#stormtrooper helmet in case you were wondering

[chipthekeeper]

Oh so when I don’t post pictures of the legos I’m doing I don’t fuck it up. Interesting

[thealtoduck]

Reunion

Cal Kestis x Male Mirialan ex-Jedi!Reader

Warnings: You flirt with stormtroopers…

Part 1: Being a mirialan jedi youngling and getting your kyber crystal…

Y/l/c = Your lightsaber color

Summary: After the fall of the Jedi Order you fled to Raxus Secundus for your survival, 5 years later Cal Kestis and the crew of the Stinger Mantis land on Raxus Secundus with their ship in need of repairs…

——

You walked in to the cantina looking around at the different patrons, you walked and sat down at the bar. The bartender soon showed up in front of you and asked ”What can i get you?”. You thought for a second and decided ”A phattro, please”.

”Coming right up” he said and soon placed a glass filled with a purple beverage in front of you. You took a sip and a familiar refreshing taste hit you. Two off-duty stormtroopers were sitting a few chairs away from you, their helmets placed next to their drinks.

They were looking towards you. You gave them a small smile and raised your glass to them in a little ”cheers”. They smiled back at you and grabbed their drinks and helmets coming over to you, sitting down on each of your sides.

”Hey beautiful, what’s your name?” said the one to your left. ”I’m Y/n, what’s yours?” you said in a alluring tone. ”They call me Red” he introduced himself with a smirk. You turned to the trooper to your right and asked ”And you?”. ”Spikes” he answered cooly.

”How may i be of assitance for the troops?” you asked taking another sip of your drink. ”Well, we’ve had a lot to attend to lately and it can get very stressfull” Red explained. ”Extremely stressfull” Spikes added. ”And we thought a pretty thing like yourself might help us… relieve some of that stress” Red said putting a hand at your waist.

You smiled a flirty smile. ”Oh really, how about we-” you started but was cut off by a sudden feeling brought on by the force, a warning? No. A familiarity, a memory, a very distant one. You stood up and looked around seeing no one. ”Are you alright?” Spikes asked.

”Uh yeah… Sorry i have to go” you said, leaving credits and a tip for the bartender. Red scoffed annoyed and said a snide ”Tease”. You ignored him and walked out on to the streets of Tamwith Bay. The connection you had felt was now lost.

You closed your eyes and tried to focus, reaching out through the force, trying to find the connection again but there was nothing. You were left alone and confused.

As you wandered home you thought to yourself about what or who it might’ve been, a Jedi? Just another force user lost in the galaxy?. Memories of the jedi and your training started flooding your brain as you entered your small apartment.

You had been made a padawan only 4 months before the collapse of the Jedi Order and the Republic. In most cases you would’ve most likely been to young to become a padawan but the Clone Wars had taken a big strain on the order and because of the deaths of many masters and padwans in battle there were a lot of gaps to fill.

You had been assigned to Jocasta Nu, the chief librarian of the Jedi archives. You didn’t earn a lot of battlefield experience from this but your master had shown you some of the secrets of the Jedi temple.

Once the destruction of the Jedi hit in full force you and your master escaped the temple through a secret passage hidden within the temple. Once on the streets of Coruscant she ordered you to get on a shuttle while she had drawn away a group of Clone Troopers.

That had been the last you ever saw of her as the shuttle had left. Sometimes you wondered if she had survived that night and had managed to escape the purge as well but even then they might’ve caught up with her sooner or later.

You lifted a loose floor panel of the ground revealing a box containing your now dusty jedi robes, a hard drive containing Jedi texts and your twin lightsabers. You brought your lightsabers out afraid to turn them on incase someone could here the noise and report it to the empire.

You shouldn’t even bring them out of their hiding spot, you never knew who was watching. But something told you that you would be needing them in a couple of hours. You went to bed that night with your lightsabers hidden under your bed in case of a intruder or sudden attacker.

You were kept allert by the force the next day, you hid your lightsabers beneath a cloak as you ventured out in to town. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary so you just tried to go about your business as usual but as evening came, things would change.

You were once again making your way home but saw people running away from the town square, you decided to check it out. Once you got there you were met with a life changing sight. It was jedi, or at least someone carrying a lightsaber who knew how to fight like a Jedi.

He was fighting what you assumed was an imperial inquisitor, you had heard rumours about them but never seen one in person. They were Jedi hunters, sent out to find the survivors of the purge.

You then felt the connection from the day before reignite, you had met this Jedi before… but who was it? Suddenly the Inquisitor used a force push to knock the Jedi in to a stack of crates, knocking him over.

As the Jedi layed among the crates you caught a glimpse of his face, he looked like… Cal Kestis, a friend of yours from the order. The Inquisitor walked menacingly towards Cal, spinnig his double bladed lightsaber.

Without thinking you forced jump up in the air and landing between Cal and the Inquisitor. You faced the Inquisitor and ignited your lightsabers making two y/l/c blades emerge from them.

”Two Jedi, this just got a lot more interesting” the Inquisitor said, his smirk being covered by the helmet. It had been a long time since you fought or even practised with your lightsabers so you begged the force would guide you.

The Inquisitor slashed at you but you dodged, you flipped over his head cutting at him but he blocked. The two of you started attacking back and forward while Cal tried to absorb what just happened. A hodded Jedi had just come out of nowhere and saved his life.

He watched as the Jedi fought, lightsabers skills clearly rusty but skilled. Cal then got of his feet and jumped, attacking the Inquisitor from behind. The Inquisitor managed to block but started to struggle keeping up with the three blades slashing at him.

While the Inquisitor was blocking an attack from both one of yours and Cal’s saber. You managed to get a cut in down the middle of the doublebladed saber, destroying it. You and Cal then force pushed the Inquisitor at the same time sending him flying in to a stone wall which knocked him out.

Cal then let out a sigh of relief at the Inquisitor’s defeat. He then turned to you and said ”You’re a Jedi”. ”Not quite” you said lowering your hood making Cal’s eyes widen as regcognition hit. ”Y/n?” he questioned.

”Hi Cal, it’s been a while” you greeted. Without warning Cal ran up to you and threw his arms around you. You were caught of guard at first but then wrapped your arms around him as well, it didn’t hit you until now how much you had missed him.

You heard troopers approaching and broke the hug. ”Come on, this way” you said and started sprinting down an alley way. Cal followed close behind. You led him back to your apartment, you gave one last look outside before closing the door, making sure you weren’t followed.

Once behind closed doors you find your arms locked around each other in another tight embrace. ”How did you survive? You were on Coruscant that would’ve been the most heavily guarded planet?” Cal questioned in amazement.

”Let’s sit down” you said, you made some tea for the two of you and poured it up in two cups. You both sat down around a small table and you started telling him how Master Nu had saved your life and that it had let you escape Coruscant.

”How about you?” you asked and Cal explained that his master had sacrificed himself for him. He then told you of the events that led him and his crew to land on Raxus Secundus a couple days ago for ship repairs.

”Y/n, you should come with us, we’re trying to rebuild some of what’s left of the Jedi Order, you could help us” Cal suggested. You thought about it for a second before answering ”Cal, I’m not sure how much i will be able to help you, i only just became a padawan before the fall of the Jedi”.

”To us that’s enough, we need to rebuild with what little we have left” Cal insisted. ”I don’t know Cal, i just need some time to think” you told him. ”Alright, you have until tommorow, me and my crew are leaving once our repairs are done” Cal said.

You opened the floor panel and brought out the hard drive out of the box. ”What’s that?” Cal asked. ”It’s a hard drive, it contains a few Jedi texts from the library. It’s not a lot but it’s something, i think you should have it” you said handing it to him.

”Thank you” Cal accepted gratefully. Cal then contacted his crew and let them know about the events of the day. They decided it was best for Cal to stay the night with you as security had tightened because of the reveal of two Jedis in the city and that he should try sneak his way to the ship at the crack of dawn.

”Where should i sleep?” Cal asked, looking around your small apartment, there weren’t many options besides the bed and the floor. ”You can have the bed” you offered. ”And let you sleep on the floor, we can share your bed, wouldn’t be the first time” Cal suggested.

”Alright” you nodded and the two of climbed in to bed together, laying on your sides to face each other. ”This reminds me of when we would sneak out of out temple rooms to have sleep overs together” Cal said making a smile spread over your face.

”I remember that and that one time Master Skywalker caught you on the way to my room but he promised not to tell anyone” you reminded Cal who let out a chuckle. ”Then after you left the temple with Master Tapal, i remember how much i missed you and how lonely i felt” you admited.

”I missed you too Y/n, especially after purge. It was terrifying having no way to know if you had survived or not” Cal said as you gazed in to each others eyes. He continued ”But now we’re both here again and i never want to leave you behind”.

Cal then leaned forward and pressed a soft kiss to your lips, from which you didn’t pull back. While attachment was against the Jedi teachings their was no order around anymore to supervise you. You were free.

As you both pulled away from each others lips you brought a hand up to cup his cheek stroking it lightly. ”I’ll come with you, i don’t want to lose you again either” you confessed. You both then fell asleep, hands clasped together ready for the challenges tommorow would bring.

[laughingphoenixleader]

Hi I Fixed the Ahsoka Ending

The stormtrooper steps out of the ship, hands raised. It wasn’t like Hera has never seen that before. She raises her pistol, questions shooting through her mind. Why is this trooper alone, why did he hail them, and, most importantly, why is something about his walk so familiar? Suspense fills the air, and she can tell that everyone around her felt it, too. The last of the steam that has spilled out of the ship’s exhaust evaporates into the air, unlike that overwhelming sense of familiarity that’s flooding her heart. She braces herself for anything, setting her jaw. Had someone she’d once been close to become a stormtrooper? She runs through a list of names in her mind, nothing turning up any results. 

Who are you and why’re you here? Chopper asks, apparently done waiting in suspense. The trooper gives no answer, continuing to step forward. 

What, are you deaf or something? Are you, are you, are you? Chopper chatters impatiently. But then, instantaneously, his mood changes. Which isn’t really unheard of. Wait, Chopper mutters, starting to roll forward. Hera wonders if he’s picked up on the familiarity, too. He’s always been more perceptive than people give him credit for. Chopper heads straight for the trooper, his ever-squeaky wheels (no amount of oil can fix that issue, and Hera’s tried) filling the silence. 

Who are you? Chopper asks as he stops at the trooper’s feet. And it’s at that moment that Hera realizes something: her mom sense is tingling. 

It can’t be. 

Huh? Huh? Huh? Chopper barks, until the trooper slowly extends one gloved hand and gently places it on Chopper’s head. Then his head spins around in giddy joy, his beeps turning into little excited ones. No words attached to them, just exclamations of happiness.

And, given that he usually hates people, there are only six of them Chopper’s ever gotten excited to see. 

And Hera’s got a feeling she knows which one this is. 

Sure enough, the trooper reaches up to grasp his helmet, and, when he pulls it from his head, the face that looks earnestly back at Hera is one she’s missed dearly. 

He looks different now. Far from the boy he once was. Navy facial hair covers the lower part of his face, and his hair is longer and curlier than when she last saw it. It had never been curly before. Human hair never ceases to amaze her. 

But he’s still got that effervescent light about him. Especially when he smiles at her, looking a little nervous, but there’s excitement spilling from him, too. She can feel it, as surely as she felt that she knew him as soon as he stepped out of that ship. 

Hera doesn’t even realize she’s lowered her gun until her hand hits her thigh. Shock and joy are washing over her, wave after overwhelmingly powerful wave. 

And grief. Because, though it doesn’t make sense, shouldn’t make sense, somehow, he looks so much like Kanan. 

Though she already knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is her boy, a part of her, the part that had always remembered the worst case scenario, that Ezra might just never come home, wants to know for sure. Doesn’t dare to believe it. 

“Ezra?” she asks, dipping her head slightly, just making sure. Because she has to. 

He seems to be as overwhelmed as she is, struggling for a moment to find the words. “Hi, Hera,” he greets her, and at that moment, even the most hopeless parts of her know it’s him. Because it’s the voice of a man who speaks back to her, but it’s youthful and casual and tentative and Ezra. That little boy who had been so lonely, who had looked up at Kanan and Hera like they were the most amazing people in the world every time they gave him something or complimented him, who had added so much joy (and chaos) to their lives, who had grown so, so much and made them so, so proud…he’s grown up, but that doesn’t mean he’s gone. He’s standing right here in front of her, after five long years. 

He gives a little shrug, his eyes and expression brimming with joy, his smile bright. “I’m home.” 

He chuckles a little, the sound sending fondness shooting through her. 

Hera exhales shakily, eyes locked onto her boy, taking him in. He’s here and he’s real and if she wakes up, she’s suing the Force itself. She shakes her head a little, the feeling of her hopes finally coming to fruition freezing her in place, somehow. To be fair, it’s a lot to process. 

Ezra slowly begins to walk forward, and Hera stands there for a few more seconds, but then she breaks out into a run, meeting him in the middle. She wraps her arms around the lost boy, and he hugs her back willingly, chuckling joyously, making her own laughter come spilling out of her. 

“It’s so good to see you,” Ezra whispers, burying his face in her shoulder like a kid. Her kid. 

She holds him closer. “I could tell you the same thing,” she replies, chuckling a little, blinking as her vision blurs with tears brought on by years of the homesickness that was being without a member of her family. By the pain that came from having no idea whether the Spectres were down to four. By having so many look at her in pity when she reported on the results of the victory on Lothal. By the obvious skepticism in people’s eyes when she told them that Ezra was missing, not dead.

They’d been wrong. She and Sabine and Ahsoka and Chopper and Zeb had been right. Though, these days, even Zeb had become disheartened. Last time they’d talked, sad skepticism had tinged his expression, too. But not for long, because Ezra is home.

And a piece of her home has returned with him. 

“Welcome home, Ezra,” she tells him, her voice choked with tears. But so is the chuckle he replies with. 

“Glad to be back, Mom,” he tells her, and a new barrage of emotions hits her, fondness and affection and love causing tears to leak from her eyes. 

They stand there like that, just holding each other, this moment too special for any more words to be spoken. 

Then she pulls away, because her Lieutenant, along with about 20 other people, are watching, and it’s starting to get a bit awkward in here. 

She looks at him up close, and those blue eyes are just as brilliant and youthful and Ezra’s as ever. She places a hand on his cheek, laughing incredulously, and he grins brightly, leaning into her touch. 

“What took you so long?” she asks, amusement and teasing in her tone, wiping at her eyes with her other hand. She drops the other one from his face and puts it on his shoulder. 

“Sorry,” he apologizes, shrugging sheepishly, but his smile only gets brighter. “I was kinda stuck, you know. Not really my fault.” 

“Fair enough,” she replies, chuckling a little. 

Ezra’s eyes light up, excitement overflowing from his voice. “Oh! I have to show you something!” 

Hera removes her hand from his shoulder to cross her arms expectantly, grinning. “Oh?” she asks playfully as he reaches for his belt, and then her eyes flick to the saber that rests on it. 

Her heart stops beating for a second. Because that saber looks heart-wrenchingly familiar. The hilt is one she’s never seen before, but the emitter is unmistakable. It’s Kanan’s. 

Hera’s breath hitches. Her gaze shifts to meet Ezra’s, shock filling her and her vision blurring again. “Is that…” she asks, her voice strangled. 

“It’s not his,” Ezra finishes, understanding in his eyes. “His was one of two,” he begins, wiping his eyes, too. “The droid that helped him build his lightsaber when he was a Padawan gave me the other. And he told me a little about him, too.” He unhooks the saber from his belt and places it in her hands, and she rubs her thumb over the hilt, the familiarity of it sends a lance of pain through her heart. 

“Huyang,” Hera realizes, smiling sadly, still stroking the saber, eyes glued to it. “Yeah, he’s told me some stories, too. When I needed them.” 

“Yeah?” Ezra asks, a vibrant mix of curiosity and excitement and sadness all sparking in his expression. 

“I’ll tell you all of them,” Hera assures him before he can ask, handing the saber back. Even though those stories would be hard to tell and talk about, he deserves to hear them. “Soon. After you tell me where Sabine and Ahsoka are.” 

That’s when smile fades from his face, and Hera’s stomach drops. Dread and panic slam into her. No. Not again. I can’t lose anyone else. 

“They’re where I was,” Ezra tells her, shame in his expression. Already blaming himself. 

“I don’t know what happened,” Hera interjects before he can finish, even as everything in her screams WHY at the Force with all its might. It’s already taken so much from me. Was all that really not enough? But she continues, focusing on her mission, which, right now, is reassuring her adopted son. “But I know that, whatever it was, it wasn’t your fault.”

“It was their choice,” Ezra admits, nodding. “Ahsoka was fighting that Elsbeth lady so that Sabine and I could escape, and Sabine couldn’t leave her.” Ezra swallows, sadness spilling from his eyes, gaze shifting to the floor. “She…she was returning the favor. Making her own sacrifice. And,” Ezra shakes his head, chuckling ironically, “as much as I hate that, I’m also really proud of her.” He looks up to meet her eyes. “You know what I mean?” 

Pain claws at her heart, but a corner of her mouth tilts up in response to his question. “Oh yeah,” she replies. “I happen to know exactly how that feels.”

Ezra chuckles, looking sheepish again. “Right. Sorry about that.” 

“You’re here now,” she assures him, placing a hand on his shoulder again. “That’s enough.” Sadness seeps into her again. “Though I’d rather have all of you here.” Sabine, the daughter she’d never had. And would probably never have. But Sabine had always been enough. Hera loves her witty humor, fiery courage, and stubborn kindness with all of her being. She’s someone you never forget after you meet her, and her absence is just as unforgettable. Ahsoka, who had become her best friend over the past few years. They’d exchanged many a secretive look during important meetings, whether because of inside jokes or exchanging wordless opinions. She’d been someone who Hera had bonded very deeply with over a relatively short period of time. Maybe it’s because both of them had left their people behind at a young age. Maybe it’s because they’ve both suffered great losses. Maybe it’s the understanding that warriors share that those who have never been on the battlefield can never understand. Whatever it is, it had made them click in a way that Hera hadn’t with anyone but the Spectres in a long time. 

She wonders how long it will be until she sees them again.  

“I can find them,” Ezra tells her, determination filling his voice, jolting her back to reality. “The Force will guide me, and I know that planet like the back of my hand. It’s practically a part of me now, so I know I can find it on a starmap.”

“I believe you, Ezra,” she tells him, letting her genuineness show through the look she gives him. Then something pops into her head, something she’s been wishing she could tell him this entire time. “And hey,” she begins, her voice quivering, just a little. “As much as I hated that sacrifice you made, I’m so proud of you.” His face lights up, and it melts her heart to know he still cares that much about her approval. 

“And Kanan would be, too,” she continues firmly, looking into her boy’s cobalt-hued eyes, which fill with grief and joy and a thousand emotions she doubts either of them can name. “He’d be so, so proud of you. You learned well, Ezra.” 

He’s lost for words, his hand unconsciously going to his saber and fidgeting with it. His expression grows heavy with pain, with all the emotions that come with losing someone you love so much. Hera wonders just how much he’s let himself grieve over the last few years. And she aims to help him in any way she can. 

“Thank you,” he murmurs, his voice and eyes weighted with how much what she said means to him. “I needed to hear that.” 

“I had a feeling,” Hera replies, smiling sadly. 

“You’re always right,” Ezra tells her, a bit of that unstoppable playfulness infusing his expression. 

He hugs her again, and not for the last time, either. 

@kanerallels @accidental-spice

[kyberrebel]

Things that went through my mind during Ahsoka Episode 6

Ahsoka is talking about not having enough time to prepare Sabine to make the right choice about leaving to find Ezra, when I don’t think any amount of training could have changed her mind. Kanan’s gone, Hera, Chopper and Zeb are often off doing New Republic stuff. Even with Ahsoka back as her Master, she is probably still feeling extremely alone. She loves Ezra, and there is no way Ahsoka could have convinced her not to go.

“Perhaps for Sabine it was the only choice.” See, Huyang gets it

Huyang saying “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away” is making me laugh my ass off

It’s hilarious, yet makes me slightly uncomfortable, since Star Wars never really breaks the fourth wall

How dare they not let Sabine share a room with her new girlfriend, Shin

OKAY BUT SERIOUSLY. LOOK AT THE WAY SHIN LOOKS AT SABINE IN THE COCKPIT, I love my space lesbians

Wow, Shin has talked more in this episode than she has in the whole show so far.

Baylon DEFINITELY has his own plan he is hiding from Morgan and the witches. Can’t wait to see how that goes

SABINE IS FINALLY USING THE FO- oh, never mind

The shot of the battered Star Destroyer arriving combined with the music is giving me chills

Hey, those are some cool ass looking Stormtroo- OH SHIT ITS THRAWN

ITS ABOUT TIME

Such an amazing entrance into live-action for him. I feel it is definitely succeeding at letting casual, non-rebel-watching fans know how important and how big of a figure he is.

I’m sorry but he still totally looks like a blue Elon Musk. 

Soooooo… Where’s Ezra?

I just know Ezra would love collecting all those cool Stormtrooper helmets

I don’t know what the rat-dog thing  is but I love him

SABINE USE YOUR LIGHTSABER

Oh hey, she actually listened to me

Lars Mikkelsen is doing a great job so far at portraying Thrawn in live-action. His mannerisms and body language are just like they were in Rebels. 

STOP YELLING AT THE RAT-DOG, SABINE, HE CAME BACK AND IS TRYING HIS BEST

No, but seriously Rat-Dog is adorable and I would die for him

*Me singing* Teenage mutant ninja turtles, teenage mutant ninja turtles!

TMNT-looking dudes know Ezra… Okay where is he then?? 

AGHHHJBJKSDK IT’S EZRA

EZRA I MISSED YOU *actually crying*

Ngl I’m kind of sad his hair isn’t blue BUT I’M STILL SO HAPPY HE’S HERE 

We all needed that hug, let’s be honest

Rat-dog is called a Howler? Good to know.

I was so scared that Ezra would be all traumatized, depressed, and a shell of himself when we saw him again, I’m so happy that’s not the case. He seems to be doing great, all things considering

I wonder if Sabine will give him back his lightsaber, or if he has been using the force at all since he’s been gone.

I hate to nitpick, but, they made his eyes blue (which I’m happy about) but not his hair??

Oh right, for a few minutes, I actually forgot Ahsoka was on her way and that this was her show

Like how last episode was for TCW fans, this episode was for Rebels fans!! Another great episode.

[burnwater13]

Finally! Someone had told the Mandalorian Bounty Hunter his name. Grogu. That’s right. Grogu. It was a name. Like Ahsoka was a name or Djarin was a name or Peli was a name. 

It’s not like Grogu had picked it for himself. He hadn’t. It was just the name he was called at the Jedi Temple. He didn’t know why they had called him that or who had named him. No one he knew admitted to being the one who did that. 

But if you said it out loud, he would turn his head and ask ‘What?’. It got his attention. That’s what names were for, right? To get your attention. When Din Djarin finally said Grogu’s name, ‘Grogu?’, Grogu had been surprised and grateful and had paid attention to the Mandalorian. Which, as it turned out, was just what Din Djarin had wanted.

Yup, the Mandalorian liked that power. The ability to say a word and capture Grogu’s complete attention. There weren’t many other ways to do that to people. The Mandalorian had found ‘Hey, kid’ less than satisfactory because Grogu always assumed Din Djarin had been talking to someone else. 

But now that he knew Grogu’s name, just who was being summoned, or scolded, or teased was no longer a mystery. It was the owner of that name, Grogu. 

Even the Imps and their collaborators didn’t know his name. They were the ones who called him ‘The Child’, like that was going to be specific enough. Although, who knows, maybe in Gal Basic ‘The Child’ meant ‘little green guy who could use the Force but wouldn’t unless he really liked you or really disliked you’. Gal Basic was strange that way.

The other strange thing was that lots of people seemed to have more than one name. After all, the Mandalorian wasn’t just Din or Djarin. Nope. He was both. Din Djarin. Like Peli was Peli Motto and Ahsoka was Ahsoka Tano. Even the Imps had two names, like Moff Gideon or Stormtrooper FN-2187. 

Grogu wondered why that happened. Did people just decide on a second name? Did their parents decide? Was it a governmental action? He could see the Empire really liking the ability to make people carry a name of their choosing, you know, since names had power. 

Look at all the Darths for example. Darth Sidious. Darth Vader. Darth Maul. Darth Tyranus. Darth Bane, who started the whole thing. They weren’t brothers, or children, or family. So the name didn’t tell you anything about them really, except to cross the street if you heard anyone say ‘Uh, oh! Here comes Darth [insert name here]!’ It was about the power.

Grogu wondered if he actually needed to learn to speak in Gal Basic now. Just to balance the power out with the Mandalorian. It seemed like the thing to do. If he could say Din or Djarin or Mando… he just might get the tall guy’s attention when he actually wanted it. That would definitely change their working dynamic. 

“Din, want frogs!”

“Djarin, want sleep.”

“Hey Mando when are we going to visit Greef Karga again? I miss IG-11!”

He could just imagine the Mandalorian’s face if he learned how to say any of that stuff. He had to imagine it since Din Djarin, Mandalorian Bounty Hunter, was wearing his helmet all the time again. Which reminded Grogu that he didn’t know the Armorer’s name. Did she even have one? Or was ‘Armorer’ like ‘Grogu’? Just a singular name that covered the whole territory of the person? Maybe. 

In which case, maybe Grogu meant something like Armorer did. It was a job. Or a skill set. Perhaps he was called Grogu because he was strong with the Force? Then anyone else strong with the Force would be called Grogu… nope. That didn’t work. Lots of other people had been strong with the Force without being called ‘Grogu’. 

It was also possible that the Jedi had run out of other names for their younglings and had called him Grogu because it was the last name left. He’d never heard of there being two Jedi with the same name. No Master Obi-Wan Kenobi, one and Master Obi-Wan Kenobi, two. Or prime, or whatever other designator would be needed to prevent confusion. 

Now he wondered how that worked across the galaxy. There were a lot of people. Did folks just have letters and a bunch of numbers appended to them so you would know the difference? That didn’t even seem real. 

Nope. Grogu liked his name and would keep it. Maybe someday he would be known as Grogu Mando, because he was a Mandalorian now. But until then, Grogu was just fine.

[envihellbender]

a sequel for the rebel ben +hux emperor vader au please😏

Thanks for the request! For reference, part one is here:

Characters: Ben Solo (rebel), Lieutenant-General Hux, Emperor Vader

Fandom: Star Wars

Ben could have used his new found freedom to escape, or warn the rebels, but he knew that was a stupid plan. Instead, he simply wandered the corridors - suspiciously at first. As soon as he left the bridge he quickly looked to either side of himself, his force blocking collar made him vulnerable and unable to properly scope his surroundings. He expected at any minute to have guards dragging him back to his cell, this whole thing having been some sick game. However, it seemed that wasn’t the case. He felt finally free for a moment, his collar didn’t seem to stop the thoughts of others entering his mind and he’d been surrounded by guards thinking about what they’d like to the “pretty little rebel dog”. Even worse was hearing what went through Lieutenant-General Hux’s mind, and for some reason his thoughts were louder than everyone else’s. When he was far away from the bridge and unsure where he was, simply following the corridors hadn’t done him much good a voice filled his mind.

“Ben, come to me…”

He froze, he recognised it. He heard it many times before, a voice he had been manipulated and tricked by as a child. He swallowed, frantically looking from side to side in hopes that it would simply be some stormtrooper instead. No such luck. Against his better judgement, he followed it - he felt it get louder and stronger as he turned right and headed down a flight of stairs. He felt the voice laugh, making his fists screw tight and his jaw clench. He felt his steps quicken into a sprint, and when he rounded a corner turning left he was stopped on his tracks by a Stormtrooper.

“Erm… Skywalker, sir?” The soldier asked, Ben stared at him with furrowed eyes.

“I’m… Ben Solo.”

“Erm, right. Well. I’m unit FN-2187 and I’m supposed to show you to your quarters.”

“Oh. Okay,” Ben replied, he turned back over his shoulder. He felt a smugness, and quiet chuckle as the voice quietened. He followed the Stormtrooper who seemed nervous, as if he hadn’t been here long. He’d heard about Lieutenant-General Hux’s child soldiers, poor brainwashed kids, some even feral children from desert planets, who were trained with a similar program from Brendol Hux’s academy. As Ben followed the white armoured soldier round a series of identical corridors he wondered how old he was, what he looked like under his helmet. Suddenly the soldier stopped, causing Ben to stumble.

“We’re here,” he said unnecessarily. He tapped a code into the door and turned to walk away.

“Erm, are you going to tell me the code?” Ben asked.

“Oh! Yeah. Fuck. It’s erm. 0311,” he said over his shoulder before hurrying away. Ben swore under his breath, of course Vader would choose that number. He was toying with him again. Ben entered his room, his thick eyebrows raised as he did. The doors shut behind him automatically and the lights came on. It was fairly spacious, it had a large double bed, a few screens he assumed showed holoprograms and such things, a comfortable looking sofa and an en-suite bathroom. He fell onto the bed, stretching out long limbs as he body finally relaxed. After being in a cell for so long he had to admit he was quite pleased to be here. A well furnished, spacious, private cell was definitely an improvement.

He hadn’t meant to fall asleep, but the way his door opened and beeped told made him awake with a start. His eyes were half lidded and he sat up, scowling when he realised who was at the end of his bed.

“Well, pleased to see your getting your rest, Solo,” Hux snarled. Ben scrambled to his feet, taking a few steps towards him with a scowl on his face.

“I wouldn’t try anything, I’m not locked up now remember,” Ben smirked, he looked Hux up and down, everything he’d heard had been correct. He might have ended up back in a cell if he attacked Hux, but he’d he damned if he was going to let some spoiled, Imperial brat get the better of him.

[starboundanon]

For the writing prompt - 19, clones(preferably the 501st legion)/luke?

TW: Dead Dove; Do Not Eat.

“Commander.”

Rex casts a curious glance down the hall, the door to his quarters sliding shut behind him. Not even two steps outside his room, and already, someone is vying for his attention. At least this time it’s only Jesse. “Lieutenant,” he says, nodding.

Jesse returns the gesture. “What’s this I hear about the Supreme Commander sending a prisoner our way for a B2?”

“Some high-ranking Rebel, apparently. Lord Vader wants to see if we can loosen his tongue — or teach him some manners.”

His lieutenant chuckles as they march in unison down the corridor, the sound modulated through his helmet and familiarly dark. Rex isn’t surprised, it’s been a long time — over a decade, in fact — since the 501st Legion has received an assignment quite like this. A bend-and-break, affectionately referred to as a B2 around the barracks. It’s more than a little below their station, but Lord Vader had personally requested it.

And if Rex were being honest, it sounds like a fantastic opportunity for the vod to blow off some steam.

Judging by the sound that greets them when the turbolift opens onto the barracks, it’s already working wonders. The closer they get to lounge 41-D, the louder the jeering, joyous laughter becomes. It’s odd for a B2 to be so public; normally, they’d be held in a captain or commander’s private quarters, with the necessary soldiers filtering in and out.

That’s not the case this time. Distantly, Rex makes a mental note to ask the Supreme Commander what the boy did to earn this degree of public humiliation. Lounge 41-D is the largest and most heavily-trafficked common area onboard the Executor. Soldiers and personnel from every rank and faction tend to flock to it — an average of about 20,000 people passing through it every single day.

Rex wouldn’t be surprised if nearly half of those people have shown up now, for this display. A wide portion of the seating area has been pushed to the side, a tall, narrow stage erected where the theater seating used to be. On the stage, Hawk and Fox stand beneath the proverbial spotlight, their body language more than a little animated as they perform for the crowd.

“Wow,” Jesse says, breathless through the vocoder. “Lucky sods. Look at him.”

Look at him, indeed, Rex thinks, stricken. Between the two vod, the nameless Rebel fights and struggles admirably in his bindings. He won’t be getting out of those anytime soon: a beskar alloy, Force-suppressing, just to be safe. Medieval stocks painted Stormtrooper white. Men five times this Rebel’s diminutive size wouldn’t be able to break out of that contraption.

The crowd all-but cheers when Fox grips the underside of one of the Rebel’s thighs and lifts his leg, providing an opening to thrust in deeper. The boy wails at the intrusion, but the sound is muffled by Hawk, who continues to slowly grind his cock into the very back of the boy’s throat, rocking his hips from side to side to stretch his mouth and throat out obscenely.

Sunlight-gold hair and bronze sun-kissed skin radiate beneath the harsh lounge room lighting. Fox finishes first, pulling out to spill over the boy’s bruised and welted ass. His mess joins what must be at least a dozen others, if not twice that much. Every inch of their pretty new assignment will likely be covered before the night is through.

Fox has hardly spent his last drop before Appo is elbowing him out of the way to take his place. A free-for-all, then, and not an order of descending rank. Curious. The men must have been more eager to bend and break this particular prisoner than he thought.

“What do you think, sir?” Jesse asks, already holstering his blaster in preparation to join the fray. “Think we’ll break him?”

“Yes, lieutenant” he says, watching as Hawk chokes the boy on his cock, and the young, unfortunate Rebel promptly splatters their makeshift breeding bench with his own come. “I have no doubt we will.”

[theboredwritertm]

"Oh, darling, everybody sees how you look at him" fic request with Din/reader! (Please and thank you :3)

Everyone Knows

A/N: Another request done and dusted. I’ve been getting some new prompt lists ready for when I open requests back up again (not sure what tumblr etiquette is for compiling a masterlist using other people’s prompt-lists, but I’m considering doing something like that), but I still have about 4 or 5 fics to finish off before then!

Rating: PG?

Pairing: Din Djarin x ForceSensitive!Reader

Warnings: Mentions of death, a bit of alcohol, that’s about it. 

Word Count:  4500 (Me, failing to keep a story under 2k words? It’s more likely than you think)

Summary: After taking on the krayt dragon together, you’re forced to confront your feelings for Din (with a little help from everyone’s favorite marshal).   

***

The monster was unlike anything you’d ever seen before.

There’d been times aboard the Crest, when there were still thousands of miles to go between stops, that you’d sit by Din, giving him your rapt attention as he’d recount one of his many stories about a particularly terrifying beast he’d encountered. Not that he would ever call them terrifying – the man had a will of steel when it came to facing these kinds of things. And on this occasion, in the middle of the Tatooine desert, things would prove no different. 

Only this time he had you.

You were still coming into your abilities, not really sure what they meant or the true extent of what you were capable of, and amazingly enough you found you were learning a lot from watching the Child. For instance, before he came along, you had never known you could heal people. A simple experiment with Din had proven this to be true enough – the man was prone to injury in his line of work – and though it had taken a lot of concentration, enough that you were sweating by the end, it got you wondering just what other miracles your hands could perform.

Now, standing beside Din and the man who had introduced himself to you both as Cobb Vanth, you stared down into the dragon’s lair and found yourself hoping those powers might come in handy.

“So, how’re we drawin’ this thing out?” Cobb asks.

You glance back at the dozens of townsfolk and Tuskens around you, sensing their uneasiness as they shuffle from foot to foot and cast occasional apprehensive glances in the direction of the danger and you’re surprised to see a couple of the Raiders step forward. Considering how well their peoples’ last attempt to draw out the beast had gone, you hadn’t expected any of them to be so willing to approach the pit again. 

Cobb glances over at them and cocks his head in immediate acceptance. Given his past troubles with their people, he can’t say he’s overly concerned over the prospect of losing a few more of them.

But you’ve never been one to stand by and watch people get hurt.

“No, wait.” The words leave your mouth automatically. Up until this point, you’d been feeling completely useless. Din had been keeping an even closer watch on you than usual since a stunt you had pulled back on Nevarro; one that had involved your unpredictable powers and the dozens of stormtroopers who’d had him cornered. Though he had come out of the situation a lot worse for wear than you had, he’d been hovering over you, keeping you a safe distance from any action ever since. You were starting to get sick of being kept on the sidelines. “I can do it,” you say. 

The Tuskens turn to look back at you, not able to understand what you’ve said, but sensing a potential change of plans, then their attention is drawn to the Mandalorian beside you as he quickly dashes their hopes. 

“No,” comes Din’s clear, expected response.

You turn to him. “I can handle this.”

“No. You’re staying where you are.”

You gaze at him for just a moment, anger starting to bubble in the pit of your stomach, before turning around and striding down the tall dune, towards the gaping mouth of the empty saarlac pit. You know better than to argue – you don’t have the time right now, but every time you did, he managed to use it as a way to distract you. You wouldn’t give him that opportunity now. You’d already made up your mind.

You feel the air stir as his hand shoots out to grab you, but you’re too quick; one of the things that’s managed to keep you alive this long, but now maybe the very thing that’s going to get you killed. 

“Dank Farrik!”

Cobb glances between the man beside him and your retreating form, attempting to hold back a smirk. In the short couple of days that he’s known you both, he’s already witnessed at least three separate arguments, none of which seemed to get either of you anywhere. He didn’t see this one going the big guy’s way, either.  

The modulator seems to amplify the frustration in Din’s voice, but you ignore it. You were more than capable of looking out for yourself, as you had proven to him numerous times now, and whatever problem he had with that was his own – you weren’t about to let his fears hold you back. Yet, as you draw closer to the yawning darkness, your heart begins to thud in your chest. For the first time, you feel the enormity of this creature, and you’ve never felt so small in your life. 

You sense him approach before you hear him. That was one advantage you’d always had over Din; he could never sneak up on you.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m tired of watching everyone else do everything,” you say, finally coming to a stop, your gaze still trained forward, “I want to play my part. I need to play my part.”

“No, you need to stay safe.” His words sound threatening despite their context, but you ignore him once more. This time he does grab you, catching you around the forearm as you raise your hands in the direction of the cave. “Stop!”You’re tempted to use your powers to throw him off, but you can feel how much he means it and you’re struck with a sudden guilt. He cares. That’s all there is to it. 

“Please, let me do this.” You stare up into his helmet and feel him gazing back, considering things. His fingers loosen from your wrist. 

“Fine. But I’m staying with you.”

“I wouldn’t expect anything less,” you reply, not bothering to hide your bitterness at the constant babysitting – though, if you’re being honest, you do feel better with him by your side.

You raise your hands again and close your eyes, focusing on the low hum of energy around you. You don’t feel it at first, but then its as if you’ve suddenly locked onto a connection – plugged yourself into an electric charge – and everything suddenly feels heightened. Everything feels more. You draw on from that, concentrating on the pit of darkness before you, then you push forward with your mind, reaching out. In the darkness, something stirs.

“What is it?” Din asks, as if he’s sensed the sudden change.

“I feel it,” you reply, eyes still closed, your brow now marked with a frown. 

He stares down at you and you finally open your eyes to meet his gaze (as much as you can through the helmet) but before either of you can say anything, a low rumbling begins to emit from the ground.

It had worked. 

And it was heading right for you. 

You’ll admit that, as much you’d wanted to play your part in this, you hadn’t really considered what came next once you did manage to draw the thing out. So now, as you watch the sand shift and begin to rise a hundred or so feet in front of you, you find yourself rooted to the spot. 

It’s Din who moves first.

Your hands had come up again, all you can think to do to hold the beast off, then suddenly a strong arm is wrapping around your waist and you’re being propelled into the air. You glance down just in time to see the enormous mouth erupt from the ground where you had just been standing.

This time, you don’t argue. You clutch onto him, air whipping through your hair, thankful that he’s just as stubborn as you are.

When you finally land, he sets you on your feet and quickly glances down to make sure you’re alright. You give him a quick nod, sensing the question in his gaze, and then he takes off again to rejoin the action. It takes you a moment to regain your balance, and you still feel the ghost of his arm around your waist, but when you glance back you find that he’s set you down by the landspeeder, with the Child. He’s put you back at the kids’ table. 

You give a frustrated growl and the baby blinks curiously at you, eyes full of wonder. He’s just happy to be here, close to someone he likes. You offer a reassuring stroke over his little head, then turn to stalk back down the dunes; back towards the rest of the group whose lives apparently don’t mean as much to Din, since he’s more them happy for them to join in despite them having little-to-no fighting experience. You’re not about to sit back and watch them all die. 

As the dragon bursts out of the sand once more, the Tuskens and townsfolk begin firing harpoons into its side – a desperate attempt to keep it in place – and you watch as it wrenches itself free with a simple shake of its body. There’s no way this plan is going to work.

When you arrive back by Din’s side, he simply looks at you, not even bothering to admonish you, knowing it’s not going to get him anywhere at this point anyway. But as you look at him, a silent warning to not push you aside again, he sees you’ve got that same look in your eyes now as you had back on Nevarro. And it worries him. 

You move off together as a unit as the dragon begins its assault, firing with everything you’ve got to get its attention – in your case, your trusty blaster pistol – stopping only when it opens its jaws wide and proceeds to spit boiling acid down onto anyone within its reach. You watch in horror as people are disintegrated before your eyes.

A massive explosion beneath it distracts it long enough for any survivors to get clear of its path, and the creature suddenly dives.

You wait, watching for any sign that it’s coming back up, but the smoking landscape is silent and still. Yet, something doesn’t feel right.

“I don’t think it’s dead,” Cobb says, voicing your concern, and you exchange worried glances.

“Me neither,” Din replies. His grip tightens on his blaster, waiting.

Then suddenly, up on the mountain, the creature bursts forth once more. It opens its mouth wide and you glance down at the people in its path about to be annihilated. You can’t watch this happen again. Moving as fast as your feet can carry you, you rush down towards them, shoving them aside with a powerful force-push seconds before the acid hits the sand, clearing them of its path just in time – leaving you in a tricky predicament. You’ve caught its attention now – and you have nowhere to go.

You catch the sound of jetpacks as Cobb and Din land either side of you, weapons raised and ready to come to your defense.

“Get back!” Din barks at you, and you find you have no choice but to listen to him. Failing to do so now, even just to prove a point, and you’re certain you’d be the dragon’s next meal. You’d pick your hill to die on one day, but this just wasn’t it. 

Din and Cobb take off into the air again, firing their weapons to draw the dragon’s attention away and give you time to escape. It works. The dragon, furious from the sudden new assault, turns and comes after them, spraying up sand as it whips its massive body in the new direction.  

As you watch them draw it further away, you can’t help but wonder what the plan is, since the original one has long fallen apart. They can’t keep drawing it away forever. Now that you have minute to breath, you look around for a way to help, and spot the explosives-laden bantha that had been led down as bait. It looks like it would rather be anywhere else and, hell, you don’t blame it, but glancing between it and the massive monster that currently has its sights set on the one man who never failed to put himself in the path of danger for you, you think maybe it was time to return the favor and finish this once and for all.

So, you grab the bellowing, hairy animal by its halter and do something stupid.

You start yelling. And waving your arms. And when that fails to grab the dragon’s attention, you start firing your weapon. Taking your odd behavior as some kind of cue, the townsfolk closest to you begin firing, too, and finally the dragon turns to face this latest assault, drawn to the movement of your waving arms and the scent wafting from the bantha. 

You spot the two armored men, now free of the dragon’s attention, flying up from the mountain before one in particular makes a sudden beeline in your direction. You can practically feel Din’s wrath radiating off of him before he even gets close, and it’s like the bantha can, too, as it begins to protest and pull against its rope. Or maybe it’s the giant monster coming to swallow it whole that has it so skittish.  Either way, you feel like an ass as you try to calm it down, knowing the only reason you’re doing so is to keep it in place long enough to be eaten.

You’re grateful to have the marshal land behind you first as Din drops down in front, poised to lose his absolute mind at you for your reckless behavior, but finding the situation momentarily put on-hold as Cobb asks to no one in particular, “Now what?”

Din’s staring at you, gaze heavy, burning, and humiliating all in one, but he doesn’t have time to berate you as the dragon breaks from a nearby dune. “I have an idea,” he says, and before either you or Cobb can ask what that is, he shoves you into the marshal’s arms and sets off the man’s jetpack, sending you both careening up and away from the dragon’s path – and leaving him right in the middle of it. 

You had come to suspect that you were in pretty deep with Din Djarin, ever since he had first rescued you many years ago, but watching him disappear into the enormous jaws of the krayt dragon was a lesson you had never asked for in how you really felt about him. Even as everyone around you falls into a stunned silence, your ears begin to buzz and you have to fight to keep your footing, absently leaning against Cobb for support as the energy drains from your legs. Cobb reaches for you but misses as you collapse down onto the sand by his feet. Your throat starts to tighten. Everything feels hazy. 

This can’t be it. This can’t be the way it happens. 

Then the beast erupts from the sand once more and you spot a familiar shape fly out of its roaring mouth. 

Your heart leaps into your throat. Suddenly, you can breathe again. Then you’re back on your feet and racing towards him.

The huge blast that follows knocks you back and you hold an arm across your eyes to protect them from the cloud of sand billowing from the site of the explosion, but even that’s not enough to stop you as you keep your sights trained on the metal armor glistening in the hot sun. 

When you finally reach Din, you stand for a moment looking at him, then a sound escapes you halfway between a sob and shout, and you shove him – hard. He stumbles backwards but remains on his feet.

“What the hell were you thinking?” You don’t think you’ve ever been this angry in your life. Fury radiates from every cell in your body, and still Din just stares at you. Then you hug him. Neither of you are expecting it, and his body stiffens immediately in surprise, but when you feel him relax and one of his arms comes up to wrap around you in return, everything suddenly feels right again. You couldn’t care less that he’s covered in gross dragon goo and that it’s probably getting all over your clothes, or that there’s a crowd of onlookers witnessing this moment between you – all you care about is the fact that he’s here, that he’s still alive. 

A cheer erupts behind you as you part, and it’s not for you and Din, but for the smoking remains of the dragon nearby, and it’s soon joined by the howls of the Tuskens as they raise their weapons in victory. 

It’s over. It’s done. And as you look up at Din, you can think of many things worth celebrating.

***

And celebrate, you do. 

As much as he had wanted to make a quiet exit once he had collected his promised armor from Cobb, you had managed to convince Din to stay in Mos Pelgo just a little longer for the revelries. It had been a long time since you’d stayed anywhere close to civilization, let alone had a good reason to celebrate; and though you’d grown used to the comfortable silence of the Razor Crest, there’s some comfort in being surrounded by happy, chattering people for once, instead of the lonely vacuum of space.

Cobb had asked you back personally for a couple of drinks at the bar, and though the invitation had been extended to both of you, Din had failed to take it that way. In hindsight, you suppose your initial run-in with Cobb is to blame for this sudden standoffish behavior, since your contribution to convincing the man to hand over the beskar had involved you telling him that the helmet was ‘a waste on a face like his’. You guess that comment hadn’t sat too well with Din, but it had just sort of slipped out. What could you say? The guy was a looker. Yet even now, as Cobb glances over at your table from the bar, offering a warm, friendly smile in your direction, you find yourself distracted. 

You look around and finally spot Din. He’d been radiating quiet irritation since arriving back, and stands now in the furthest corner of the room, watching the festivities with what you imagined was a sulky expression beneath the helmet. The Child sits by his feet, on the sandy floor, playing with something round and shiny, completely absorbed in his own little world.

“I take it Mandalorian’s aren’t much for parties,” Cobb comments as he finally reaches your side with drinks, breaking you from you trance. He sits down beside you and slides one of the glasses of bright-blue liquid your way.

“What do you mean?” you ask.

He nods over towards Din whose gaze is currently burning into you, and you shift uncomfortably trying to find somewhere else to direct your attention, unsure why you don’t just look at Cobb. You realize why when your eyes shift back to him and the feeling of being watched intensifies. 

“Him?” you reply, trying to sound casual, now hyperaware that Din is currently reading every detail of this interaction, “Oh, he usually just prefers the quiet, you know? Not really the social type. He’s only here because I asked.”

“Just watching over his girl, huh?” Cobb teases, taking a swig of his spotchka.

“His gir—What are talking about?”

He frowns before giving you a knowing look, then risks a quick, pointed glance towards Din, who he’s noticed hasn’t turned his gaze away from you for longer than a few seconds the entire evening. 

“We’re just friends,” you tell him, even if that label doesn’t feel quite right to you. “It’s not like that.” You take a mouthful of drink just to give yourself something to do, and wince at the unexpected bitterness. When you glance back over at Din, your cheeks heat up a little when you realize he’s still looking back. You finally drop your gaze away, reassuring yourself that the weird feeling you’ve suddenly gotten in your stomach is just the alcohol taking affect, but when you look back at Cobb you catch him smirking at you. 

“We’re friends,” you repeat, wondering who you’re trying to convince now, since Cobb seems pretty damn decided on the matter. “Colleagues, you know. We’ve just been through a lot together.” You frown as he chuckles. “What?”

“I did not just spend two days listening to the two of you bicker like an old married couple, to hear you say that you two are ‘just friends’.”

“I don’t know what to tell you. I guess I just don’t look at him that way.”

“Oh, darlin’, everybody sees how you look at him.”

You think back to the desert, to your arms wrapping around him like he might disappear again at any moment; to the arm that had pulled you closer and squeezed you in return. 

You take another gulp of spotchka to calm the fluttering feeling in your belly, and shoot a quick glance over to see if he’s still looking at you.

But he’s gone.

Panic floods over you.

You look around the room, hoping you don’t look as desperate as you suddenly feel, when Cobb nudges you. You look back at him and he nods to the door, where you just manage to catch a flash of cape and armor and Din disappears through it into the night.

Cobb smiles. “Go on. Go talk to the guy. I’ll still be here if you want another drink. If not, I hope we meet again someday.” He tips his glass towards you and you nod, managing a brief smile of appreciation as you stand. 

Your legs feel heavy as you walk towards the exit. It’s dark outside – almost pitch black aside from a scattering of light coming through a few windows, and the few fires burning outside to keep people warm on the cold desert night – and you breathe a sigh of relief as you spot Din still standing out on the road. It looks like the kid is giving him some trouble, his fussy cries reaching your ears easily in the quiet. He settles as soon as he sees you, though, and Din turns to see what has the ability to calm him so quickly. 

Of course, it’s you, he thinks. He should have known – you have the same effect on him.

“Hey,” you greet, still fighting back these unexplained nerves as you approach him. You’d known him for years, spent a lot of time in his company, and been through a lot together, but it’s the first time you feel nervous around him.

“Hey,” he replies simply, “I was just heading to take him back to the ship.” He pauses like he’s weighing up what he wants to say next, then adds, “When should I expect you back?”

“Back?”

“I can meet you there in the morning if that’s more suitable.” 

He’s acting weird, and though you know exactly why, you can’t help but frown at the bitterness in his tone. He’s trying to keep it cool and calm around the kid. You wonder what he’d be saying instead if it was just the two of you. 

“Why would you do that? Why would—” You hate what he’s implying, but you need him to say it, to admit why it’s a problem for him – to know if Cobb’s right. “Where am I supposed to be in all of this?”

You stare at him, the question written on your furrowed brow, wondering if he has the guts to admit the accusation outright. 

He looks back towards the bar and then back at you, cocking his helmet as if he’s expecting you to be the one to make the confession, even if there is a low rage bubbling away inside of him at the thought of it. He thinks back to the desert, to the feeling of your arms wrapped around him, to the way his own arm had come up instinctually to hold you closer, and he thinks of how much he wants that again.

“I’m coming back to the ship,” you tell him.

“Don’t do that on my account,” he replies, and you swear he says things like that just to piss you off. 

Before you can formulate a response, he turns away and starts walking towards his borrowed landspeeder. The Child looks back at you over his shoulder and stretches his little arms towards you with a cry, but Din ignores it.

You almost shout his name, forgetting for a moment where you are, and instead splutter out an awkward ‘Mando!’, which you haven’t called him in over a year; not since he entrusted you with his true name. He stops and slowly turns back. By now the kid is wriggling and fussing so much in his arms that he has to put him down, and the little one immediately heads towards you, reaching up to be held. You scoop him up and Din watches as the kid coos happily and buries his face in your hair. He’d thought they were leaving without you, Din realizes, and he can’t help but wonder if the kid’s picked up on his own emotions too – at his own distress at the thought of leaving you behind. 

He watches you for a moment as you soothe the Child, observing the tender way you fuss over him, and feels guilt start to creep over him.

“I am doing it on your account,” you tell him firmly, after a moment, finally looking back at him again, and his helmet tilts slightly as he stares back at you. You screw up your face like you hate the idea of having to say the next words out loud, but you do anyway for his sake. “I’m not interested in the marshal.”

He makes a non-committal noise like he either doesn’t believe you or he’s pretending it’s not a big deal, and you roll your eyes, turning your attention back to the kid. 

You wonder what you can say, how you’re going to make him understand what you’re feeling, because you can’t go back to the ship like this – things can’t just keep on going how they have been, with the arguments and all these unspoken words that are causing them. So, you step forward, closing the gap between the two of you as you rest a hand against his chest plate to get his attention. 

Din stares down at you, heart thumping as he tries to read your expression and figure out what you’re going to say before you say it, hoping he’ll be less caught off guard this way.

You reach up to the back of his helmet, guiding him down towards you, muttering, “Come here, you idiot.” Then you press your forehead to the cold beskar of his helmet and find a way to tell him.

“Where you go, I go.”

He seems to understand that well enough. 

[cal-kestis]

You Mean More | Din Djarin x Fem!Reader

(Part III of The Aftermath of Losing Everything)

moodboard/sketch/gifs made by me, please don’t repost :)

Summary: The plan goes as follows: Send the Mandalorian to the Imperial base under the guise of full cooperation and stall the holoprojector Imp for as long as possible. This will give you enough time to sneak in through an air vent, find a terminal, and hack the system, wiping every Imperial archive of Din Djarin's face. It should work, right? As long as no one gets hurt. (Set after S2) Rating: M    Word Count: 8023 Warnings/Tags: Soft!Din, Fluff, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Slow Burn, no use of ‘Y/N’, non-explicit smut, canon-typical violence, blood A/N: This is what they call: the climax.

[PART I] // [PART II] // [Read on AO3] // [Series Masterlist]

xi.

As Din flies to the Imperial base, the only sounds filling the cockpit are the low beeps of the control board and the tense quiet of your voice repeating the plan for the twenty-third time. When you finally land on an icy planet, you see the base outside the viewport blending in with its snowy surroundings — white, cold, frozen in time — and two stormtroopers flanking either side of the sealed entrance.

“Check your comlink,” Din says, voice gentle and authoritative. 

“Testing, testing. Cuyan to Shiny Head, do you copy?” You whisper-shout into the device, watching as his gloved hand reaches for the side of his helmet, listening to your words spoken directly into his ear. He nods.

“You’re not calling me ‘Shiny Head’ by the way.”

You want to laugh. Normally, you would. But anxiety drops low in your stomach again as you peer out to the base. 

“This is going to work,” you whisper and he wonders whether you’re saying that for his sake or to convince yourself.

“Don’t leave the ship until I give you the signal,” he says, his hands grasping both of your shoulders, thumbs brushing your upper arms in gentle circles. You only nod in response, your eyes boring into the visor of his helmet, biting your lip hard enough to draw blood. When he pulls you against his chest and tightens his grip, your body sinks into his, trying to memorize how you fit together in case it’s all you have left. Too soon, he’s letting go, leaving only the crown of his helmet connected to your forehead when he echoes your words, “This is going to work.”

The moment he exits the ship, you sprint to the engine bay and pull the ship’s electro-periscope from the ceiling. Through the red-tinted binoc lens, you have a magnified view of the Mandalorian as he saunters up to the base’s entrance, not even flinching as the stormtroopers draw their blasters.

You watch his helmet turn wide to the left and swing slowly to the right, scanning the base as the troopers check his person and confiscate his blaster. The stormtroopers step back to their posts, leaving Din standing in the middle of the snow outside of a round, closed door. Waiting.

“Cuyan Two to Cuyan One,” you mutter into the comlink. “What are you seeing?”

You’re met with a long gap of static and you panic, thinking the coms are jammed, before he finally answers.

“You were right, Cuyan One,” he whispers, the hint of a smile in his voice despite the circumstances. “There’s a small duct to the left of the entrance. You’ll have to distract the guard troopers.”

“I can manage.”

“I know you can,” he says, steadfast as ever. Din believes in you without an ounce of hesitation and it makes you feel like you could command stars into existence and the galaxy would obey. “After I give the signal, go to my weapons locker. There’s a locked box at the bottom. Punch in my code and take the bag inside it with you."

“What’s in it?” You ask, watching as the doors to the base finally open, revealing another pair of stormtroopers, one with red markings on their armor. A Burner, more infamously known as an Incinerator Trooper.

“Things to keep you safe,” he answers quickly.

One of the guards gives Din’s blaster to the troopers now leading him into the base. And before the doors close, you see Din’s fingers interlock behind his back: the signal.

Focusing the periscope on the two guard troopers, you scan the area again, looking for a way to distract them without causing a scene. Aside from a patch of bushes to the right of the base, the area is blanketed in pure white snow with nothing to give you cover. Great.

As you think over your next move, you run to Din’s weapons cabinet and rummage through his arsenal, finding the locked box under an old cloak. You punch his code into the number pad — 47648, ‘GROGU’ on a 10-key pad you remember with a bittersweet smile — and the box opens with a quiet click. As promised, there’s a small tan-colored pouch with a shoulder strap and, inside it, you find a blaster that fits perfectly in your hand and what looks like a silver sword hilt, its blade completely missing. You run your fingers across the angular handle, confused as to how a bladeless weapon could “keep you safe.” But when your finger presses over a smooth panel on the hilt, a high-pitched sound emits from its chamber and a black blade glows in front of your face. 

A lightsaber, you think, like the ones Din had told you about what feels like a lifetime ago. But this one isn’t green like the one he’d described Grogu’s master used or white like Ahsoka Tano’s twin sabers. It's dark and blinding, laced with an energy you’re far too frightened to wield. You retract the blade almost immediately, heart racing as you stuff both weapons into the worn bag and sling it over your shoulder.

Taking a long, steadying breath, you slowly step onto the boarding ramp — thanking the Maker Din had the sense to leave it down so it wouldn’t make a noise and blow your cover. He hadn’t parked the ship too far from the entrance and you can clearly see the duct he’d mentioned a few yards away. If you can just get the stormtroopers to turn in the other direction, you could sprint and be in the clear.

The plan is dumb, you know it. But it’s already the day of dumb plans and it’s all you have. Kneeling, you gather a mass of powdery snow in your gloved hands and press it together until it clumps into a dense ball. With your arms outstretched in front of you, you close your eyes and reach out with your mind, focusing your thoughts on the ball of snow in your palms.

The snow levitates high above you, high above even the Imperial base, and toward the trooper standing on the right side of the entry. You lower the ball just to his head-level and out of his eyesight, flick your wrist slowly to the right to gain some momentum, then snap it quickly to the left, smacking the stormtrooper hard against his helmet.

“What the hell?” You hear the stormtrooper shout, shuffling back on his feet.

“What happened?” The other asks.

“I just got hit with a snowball?” He answers with his own question, rubbing the side of his helmet.

You focus your thoughts again, this time, reaching out toward the bushes to the right of the base, causing the branches to wiggle and rustle. 

The two troopers snap their heads in the direction of the mysterious sound, walking slowly with their blasters aimed and ready. And when they reach the bushes, aimlessly kicking at the shrubs with their boots, you run for it.

Your lungs are on fire when you reach the duct, fingers trembling as you quietly jiggle off the vent’s cover to give yourself an opening. You crawl in the chamber and quickly replace the cover before the stormtroopers return to their posts.

Once you’re safe inside the duct, you turn Din’s line back on so you can hear his side of the mission.

“I’m in,” you whisper.

On his end, you hear him grunt quietly in acknowledgment before the line is filled with only the faint sound of marching boots. 

You have no idea where you’re going — probably the dumbest part of your entire plan — but you hope to stumble upon a terminal or control room sooner rather than later so you and Din can leave this nightmare in the past.

The base’s air vent system proves to be an endless maze, however, with forks and crossroads at every turn. Your knees start to ache as they press and slide across the metal ducting, your hands leaving trails of water as the thin layer of ice on your gloves melts away. You freeze when you hear footsteps below the air duct, holding your breath as you peer through the slits of a vent to see a platoon of stormtroopers marching through the corridor.

After what feels like hours, you finally find a small, surprisingly empty room filled with computer terminals and open a vent panel before quietly dropping down from the ceiling.

By no means would you call yourself a hacking wizard, but you had some tricks up your sleeve. Years of scraping by on your own will teach you a host of odd skills. Within seconds, you bypass the facial scanners and begin combing through the archives before you hear some static crackle in your earpiece once again.

“Please, no need for formalities," you hear a faint voice taunt through Din’s com. “We already know what you look like.”

It’s the holoprojector Imp, the familiar sound of her throaty voice floods your ears. Din doesn’t respond, and you imagine him standing like a statue, calculating the odds and armed with nothing but beskar and silence.

“Very well,” the Imp says. “Leave the helmet on. We have more important matters to discuss.”

“I almost have it,” you whisper to Din, hoping your encouraging progress can serve as another weapon.

“Now, Din Djarin,” the Imp calls, his name dripping out of her mouth like venom. “Don’t think we’d be so foolish to believe you’d assist us willingly. Assume that we know everything.”

A shiver runs down your spine from the thinly concealed threat, and your fingers fly faster over the controls as time slips through the cracks. 

Finally, you find it, a record labeled: ‘Din Djarin.’ And you erase every trace of him.

“Got it, Cuyan One,” you sigh a breath of relief into the comlink.

“For example,” the Imp is still talking, and you roll your eyes knowing you’ve already won. “We know you did not come here alone.”

Suddenly, the blast doors of the terminal room open with a whoosh, and you back up against the machines as two stormtroopers corner you in. With a blessed shred of forethought, you blindly pull one of the weapons out of Din’s bag behind your back and sneak it into the back waistband of your pants, covered by your thick cloak. Just as you thought, one stormtrooper tears the bag from your shoulder, looking inside to find the other weapon without searching you further.

They push you down the corridor, jabbing you in the middle of your back with the barrel of their blasters, and you count each step before stopping in front of a heavy-looking door on the shadowy end of the hall.

Din’s voice enters your ears at the same moment. 

“If you even think about hurting her, you’re already dead.”

The door opens, revealing a dark room bathed in ominous red light. In the middle, the holoprojector Imp stands with her legs spread and her hands behind her back, flanked by two stormtroopers. Somehow, the Imp looks even paler without the blue tint of holo coloring her skin. It makes her eyes appear pitch black in comparison, piercing as they slant at you in unmasked scrutiny. She wears the same darkness in her hair which is cut blunt and short, severe against her skeletal pallor. In front of her, Din kneels on the ground, the Burner standing only a few steps behind him, flamethrower at the ready.

With your two captors holding you by the arms in a room filled with enemies, the odds feel slim to none. Din’s helmet turns to you, his beskar shrouded in red, and you do your best to send him a reassuring smile.

The Imp suddenly says your full name, a grin splitting her face in half when you turn to her in shock. “So nice of you to join us.”

“You already lost,” you spit at the Imp, grinning wider than her. “I erased the archives. You have nothing.”

“Oh, such a pretty, foolish girl,” the Imp sings and you hear the teasing, grating noise from both her true voice and its distortion through your comlink. With your arms trapped, you can’t even turn off the device, and you cringe each time the dissonance scratches its way into your ears. “You may have wiped the systems but I have a backup drive,” she smirks, patting the badge-decorated pocket on her uniform. “In fact, I’ve also collected some interesting records on you, my dear. About your family, your… history.”

She’s bluffing, she has to be.

“Assume that we know everything,” the Imp repeats. 

“Who are you?” You grit through bared teeth.

She laughs and you wipe your ear on your shoulder in disgust.

“Surely you both understand if I choose to withhold certain information. One's identity can be so very…” the Imp pretends to consider her words, glancing at Din and then sneering back at you as she taps a gloved finger against her pale, pointed chin. “Valuable.”

You lunge at her, a snarl ripping from your throat, but a trooper holds you back with a painful grip, his blaster digging into your side.

“Now, Din Djarin,” the Imp says, turning her attention back to the kneeling warrior. “If you don’t want to watch me kill your partner, you’ll do as I wish. Help me retrieve Gideon. Otherwise, you both shall die here.” Her blaster clicks as she points the barrel between his eyes with horrifying gracefulness. 

“No!” You scream, turning every weapon in the room on you.

“Let her go,” Din practically growls.

“Ah,” the Imp says, walking to where you stand on the other side of the room, her weapon dangling like a child's toy from her fingers. “Or perhaps the girl can be of better help? With the proper motivation, of course. Tell me, where are they keeping the Moff? I wouldn’t want to be forced to make a roast out of your Mandalorian.”

With a snap of the Imp’s fingers, the Burner points his flamethrower at Din’s head. But somehow, in that same instant, you manage to rip yourself out of the troopers’ holds, making them stumble backward. And your hand flies forward, lifting the Imperial officer from the ground.

The troopers seem dumbfounded by the magic they’re witnessing, blasters pointed at the ground in their stupor. You can almost see their slack-jawed expressions through their helmets as the Imp clutches her hands around her throat, gasping for air and hovering a foot above the floor.

“A Jedi?” She croaks.

Assume that we know everything. You knew it. A bluff.

“Wrong again,” you grin, pushing your hand forward and sending the Imp soaring across the room. Her head hits metal with a heavy crash, falling unconscious, and at the same time, a loud alarm sounds throughout the base. Somehow, the red of the room grows darker and more saturated as lights flash on the ceiling.

Blaster fire ricochets off the red-tinted walls when the troopers come back to reality, the blasts deafening as you dodge them, thankful it’s just a group of bad-shot stormtroopers and not an elite unit.

One stormtrooper charges toward you, raising the butt of his blaster to strike, but you kick him hard in the stomach, plowing him into the floor. In the corner of your eye, you see Din twist in a circle, his wrists still bound behind him as he sweeps his leg under the Burner, making the trooper fall backward with a thud.

You rush over to Din, pulling the saber from your waistband and igniting the blade to cut his binders off. You wordlessly hand him the sword but he pushes it back toward you.

“Use it,” he says, squeezing your wrist before turning back to knock the flamethrower out of the Burner’s grasp.

You’ve been in your fair share of scuffles back on Tatooine, even some while working with the Mandalorian — but you’ve never fought with a sword before. Clumsily, you swing the blade in front of you, brandishing it toward the troopers without skill.

“How do I use this thing?” You shout at Din who is busy punching a stormtrooper and taking back his blaster.

“It’s a sword,” he yells over the alarm, shooting a third clueless trooper. “Stab something!”

With both hands gripping the hilt, you send the blade slicing through the air, a loud humming sound echoing in your ears with each swing. And when you hit the side of one final stormtrooper, the strike punctuated by a roaring crackle, he’s on the ground, his white armor sizzling as it melts.

But while the chaos in the red room settles, a larger battle brews outside its doors.

“I erased it, they have nothing,” you explain breathlessly, retracting the saber as Din surveys your body for injuries. You pull Din’s bag off the fallen trooper and replace the sword inside. “The Imp was bluffing.”

You run over to the unconscious woman regardless, checking her pockets. Empty.

“Are you sure?” He asks when you return to him, holding your trembling shoulders.

“Positive. It’s like I could sense it.”

A loud crash echoes in the corridors, making you jump away from him.

“Let’s get out of here,” Din says, at the same moment you scream, “Watch out!”

It happens in slow motion. The Incinerator Trooper pushes himself on his feet and reaches for his flamethrower. Din’s gaze is focused on you when you see the trooper take aim, a small fire beginning to bloom from the barrel.

Your arms wrap around Din instinctively, attempting to shield his body with your own. You wait for the burning heat, for the scorch of flames to lick at your skin. You wait to hear both your agonizing screams before you and Din leave the universe together. But as bright orange and red tendrils flash behind your closed eyelids, you only feel cool beskar.

Opening your eyes, you see a dome of fire just inches away from your bodies. Din pulls away slowly, taking in the sight of the inferno around him, dancing flames reflecting off his armor.

“Are you doing this?” He asks, a hazy memory creeping into his mind of the stand-off on Nevarro.

You squint through the fire, only finding the Burner with his thrower still aimed forward. You are doing this. Closing your eyes again, you reach out and focus your thoughts harder on the protective shield blocking the flames. Your mind pushes forward and deflects the fire backward, hurling the blaze and embers into the trooper. When the flames dissipate, the Burner collapses to the ground, his suit scorched and blackened.

Standing in the middle of the destruction, you stare at your hands in shock before yellow-tipped gloves grab them and pull you out of the room. 

“We have to go,” Din says.

The halls flash with red lights, sirens soaring through the narrow corridors as trooper footsteps drum closer and closer.

Din leads you quickly through the base and out where he first entered. But you’re met by a rain of blaster fire as you both attempt to sprint back to the ship in one piece. Din pushes you in front of him, running backward as he shoots and blocks the blasters with the armor on his chest.

“Hang on,” he shouts, and before you can question it, he’s scooping you into his arms and launching off the ground.

He flies to the parked ship in record timing. But before he can make his landing, a blast hits his jetpack. It combusts with a deafening boom, right next to your ear, and it sends both of you hurdling into the ice. For a moment, you can’t hear a thing except for the echo of the explosion as you fall to the pillowy snow. Then, beside you, you hear a dull crack of beskar on thick, hardened ice and Din groaning aloud in agony.

“No!” You shout, coming to your senses when you see his leg bent at a strange angle, blood seeping onto the ice from his helmet.

“Get us out of here,” he grits out.

It feels frighteningly familiar pulling his body into the ship, danger looming from all sides as blasts continue to ding off the freighter or melt into the snow. You close the ramp, leave Din in the hold, and get the ship high above the ground.

But you hesitate, hovering in the air for a long moment, before making a choice.

Charging the gunners, you aim at the Imperial base and release a shockwave of vengeful blasts. And as the facility and everything inside and around it disintegrates into ash and rubble, you launch into hyperspace, leaving nothing behind.

The next moments pass by in a blur, Din’s cries ringing loudly in your ears as you try to figure out what to do. He gives you strained instructions but you can barely understand him.

“Reset the bone,” he grunts with just enough clarity, all while writhing in pain.

“Reset the bone,” you echo. “Right. I can do this. I’ll need to cut your pants.”

You find a small blade, remove his boot and armor, and slice a line from the bottom of his pant leg to just above his knee. With one hand gripping below his knee and the other pressing down on his thigh, you pull and hear the bone snap back into place as Din screams. You run to the storage closet for the medpac and return with bacta gel in hand, smoothing it over the purple, splotchy skin around Din’s leg before delicately wrapping it with the cut fabric of his pants and a makeshift splint.

“Your head,” you remember, searching for the wound under his cowl, and he wheezes as if to confirm. “No. No, no, no, no, no. Oh, stars, Din. This is bad,” you sputter, your palm painted in his blood.

“It’s okay,” he whispers, breath slowing as he brushes his fingers through your hair. “You did so good back there, cuyan. My survivor.”

“Hey, don’t talk like that,” you cry, tears rolling in waves down your cheeks. “You’re Cuyan One, remember? You’re going to be alright. I’m gonna fix this.”

“You’re so brave, so clever, so strong,” he continues, coughing between words. “Kotep, mirdala, kotyc. Ner kar’ta,” he croaks, voice fading out.

“Stay with me, Din!” You shout.

“I want to see your face,” he mumbles as if in a trance.

“I’m here, Din,” you tell him, taking his hand and placing it on your cheek. “I’m here.”

“No,” he coughs. “I want to see your face with my own eyes.”

You stare at him, waiting for him to retract his words. When he doesn’t, he pulls your joined hands to his helmet. You’re shaking when your other hand finds the opposite side of the beskar, releasing the lock and lifting it from his head.

His face is covered in blood and cuts, his brown eyes drooping with fatigue, dark hair plastered to his forehead. 

“Oh, Din,” you cry, unable to even process him without a helmet for the first time as you take in the damage. You can’t even see him behind the wounds that mar his features. But he sees you. His hand comes back to your cheek, thumb sliding back and forth in a half-moon shape.

“Mesh’la,” he whispers. “Means beautiful. You are so beautiful, ner kar’ta.”

You blink hard, heavy tears landing on his armor drop after drop even as he tries to brush them away. Your hand covers his own on your cheek, fiercely pressing his palm into your skin like you’re afraid he’ll let go. Kissing the exposed skin of his wrist, you taste a tragic mixture of blaster residue and wet salt on your lips.

“I can’t remember what ner kar’ta means,” you sob. “Please tell me.”

One corner of his lips twitches upward, a strained, painful effort to smile, but he does everything in his power to let you see it.

“It means,” he gasps. “My heart.”

His hand falls from your cheek, limp in your lap and your body shakes at the loss of his touch. You can still hear his shallow breaths but you’re not sure how much longer he can go in this state. You close your eyes, holding his hand as your fingers brush over his glove. The inside of the ship is silent — peaceful and still as if unaware that your entire universe is crumbling in front of you. There’s not enough bacta in the galaxy to treat the trauma he’s sustaining in his head. You can hardly see his skin under the layers of blood and scrapes.

His warm, honeyed voice echoes in your mind, stories he’s told you over and over when you’d make any excuse to hear his voice, stories about him and Grogu. You think of his little green son, how you’re failing him right now. Please take care of my father.

Din always sounded so wistful when he talked about Grogu, so in awe of his power.

He could do things I couldn’t even imagine… 

He saved me, in more ways than one… 

Grogu is a special kid… 

He could heal people.

“He could heal people!” You shout out loud, eyes bulging from their sockets.

In all your years of walking a tightrope when it came to your strange wizard-like powers, you’d never imagined you could heal. All those times you’d tried to fall asleep covered in bruises or cuts, you could have prevented so many nights of excruciating physical pain. But now is not the time to dwell on the past when your future is slipping through your fingers.

You close your eyes again — slowly resting one hand on Din’s cheek, the other still clutching his limp hand — and try to relax, reach out with your mind, reach inside, and focus your thoughts, emotions, energy, everything you have on the man in front of you.

It flows out of you in waves, sinking into him, and you feel it: your body growing more tired each second, only hoping your vitality is transferring into him. Just when you’re about to pass out, you hear him gasp for air, his body shooting up like a fish out of water.

“Din?” You blearily wonder. But his face blurs out of focus before you fall to the floor.

 —

x.

In the face of pain, the body has natural defenses to harden itself, like the calluses that develop on your fingertips and heels for armor. You can build a tolerance, a certain degree of numbness until pain regresses to a dull ache at the back of your mind. And sometimes, the skin gets so thick, the body so paralyzed, that you start to believe nothing could ever hurt you. Not coarse sand crystals or alleyway scum or sharp-clawed rancors or stormtrooper blasts.

But it’s funny how protection covering the outside does nothing to shield what lies underneath — merely a shattered fortress with cracks that let pain seep into the bloodstream and petrify the heart.

When Din’s hand had dropped limp in yours, you hadn’t felt the pain of his wounds or scars shrouding your body. Instead, you’d felt a unique kind of suffering, torture that hadn’t left your skin bruised but had rather sunken into your pores and gnawed at your insides: fear, loss, mourning.

The agonizing ache lingers in your muscles when you finally awaken.

The mattress beneath you envelopes your senses in a familiar fragrance of warmth and safety. Brightness filters in through the open door across the room and a sliver of light glares in one of your eyes, making you rub your fist against your eyelids to regain focus.

As your vision sharpens, you quickly realize you’re not in your own sleeping quarters.

These sheets are dark, the opposite of the crisp white color you’ve been used to for nearly a year. Knickknacks don’t litter the metal floors and socks aren’t piled up in the corner as you remember. The room is mostly bare, stripped down to the necessities, organized and empty to an almost alarming degree.

Then, a splash of color catches your eye on the durasteel wall near the door. It’s difficult to see with the glare spotlighting your face, leaving your surroundings in the shadows. Deciding to investigate, you wrap Din’s blanket tight around your shoulders, keeping his comforting scent around you like a cocoon. When your sock-covered feet finally carry you across his room to the wall in question, you gasp.

Tacked onto Din’s wall are at least a dozen small pages of parchment depicting lively landscapes of planets you’ve visited and picturesque portraits of creatures you’ve encountered together. Your drawings. You remember the times he’d come back from an easy mission, a charming swagger in his gait, and had asked to see what you’d drawn. He’d always held your booklet in his hands so delicately, taking the time he didn’t have to study and praise your work. When he’d hand it back, you’d tear the page from its binding and whisper, “You can keep it.” You’d never thought much of it, except that you’d wanted to share the beauty you’d captured with him. After all, he’d given you all these beautiful colors to do so. But more than that, you’d wanted to let him see the galaxy through your eyes since his own stayed shadowed by his visor. Whenever he’d allowed himself to indulge in removing his helmet in private, you’d hoped he could see what you saw through the pages. You’d never once thought he’d keep your drawings so sacredly displayed in his quarters, assuming the doodles would eventually pile up in some forgotten corner on the ship. But he’d kept each one.

And right in the center, you see the first picture you’d ever drawn for him: a portrait of Grogu sketched according to Din’s affectionate descriptions. It’s slightly folded in on itself from the way he’d tucked it neatly into his shoulder pouch for safekeeping. When you’d drawn it for him, you’d just wanted to do him a simple kindness, the same way he’d been so kind to help you leave Tatooine behind and travel the galaxies with him. You’d only had your pencil at the time, none of Din’s thoughtfully gifted pigments at your disposal, leaving the portrait of the child monochromatic. But now, vibrant color adorns the sketch, bringing Grogu to life in beautiful tones of green, pink, and brown.

Din had borrowed your chalk pigments and colored it in himself. You imagine him with vivid hues dusting his fingertips and green smudges on his beskar, and you smile.

But when you pull back the folded edge of the paper, you’re surprised to see another figure has been drawn next to Grogu, an image you don’t recognize as work of your own. 

It’s… you.

Water blurs your vision but you quickly wipe the tears away so they don’t somehow fly onto the pages and ruin his picture. He’d colored you in your favorite garments, a familiar pink flower tucked behind your ear along with your pencil. Careful, reverent strokes define each of your features. You can’t help but think it looks like you and a stranger at the same time, and you wonder if this radiant image he’s drawn is truly who you are or just how he sees you. And what if those two ideas are one and the same?

You don’t notice Din leaning against the doorframe until you hear your name in a deep, dulcet tone. He whispers it, uninhibited by his helmet, and suddenly your name has a thousand more meanings than just some arbitrary label for the girl who used to be alone. When he says it, your name means survivor, brave, clever, strong, beautiful, his entire heart — and all you want is to dive headfirst into the sweet nectar of his voice.

But then you remember what happened, how you let him get hurt, how you failed to take care of him as Grogu had asked. You don't realize you’re crying until his bare finger swipes away a single tear.

And even though you technically already saw his face — albeit bloodied and distorted — you dare not look at him. You keep your eyes trained low, noticing his unbandaged leg, as his hands caress your skin.

“Are you feeling better?” He asks, voice so heavy with concern it weighs down against your heart.

You nod. “How long was I out?”

“About 16 hours,” he answers, crooking his finger below your chin to pull your eyes to his.

“What about your Creed?” You ask, closing your eyes tight. 

“You mean more.” 

You expected to hear something more along the lines of ‘you already saw my face’ or ‘I’ve broken it before.’ But no, he says, ‘You. Mean. More.’ They’re three simple words that carry mountains of blissful promises, an echo of a sentiment you’d heard him say about his child, a different time that feels so far away now.

So, you open your eyes, look up, and one of your hands cradles the side of his face. He’s fully healed and the blood from the nightmare before is washed away, the red stain only living in your mind, allowing you to finally see him clearly.

You’ve always had some sense of his face. He’d given you so many pieces, letting your fingers map out his features and answering your questions so you could sketch them onto paper. Some things you can know without seeing. But having him in front of you — stripped of his armor and helmet, a soft errant curl brushing over his forehead, warm tan skin on display just aching for your fingers to explore them the way they did before you’d ever seen him — it feels like setting down the last piece of a puzzle. 

He’s beautiful in the way that broken stones and crystal fragments are when they form a mosaic, each piece jagged yet fitting together into a purposeful masterpiece.

And the way he looks at you, like you’re home when all he’s ever known is running… you’ll do anything to keep him looking at you like this.

He enters his quarters fully, extending his arms to hold you closer. When he leans his forehead against your own, you close your eyes. His warm breath tickles your skin, the slope of his nose slowly nuzzling against yours, and when you let yourself peek at him again from under your lashes, you see his eyes are softly shut, the smallest of smiles on his lips.

“When did you draw this one?” You ask, voice but a whisper, nodding at the papers on his wall.

“While you were resting... I’m not much of an artist,” he says sheepishly, watching your fingers delicately trace the lines of his drawing. “But I wanted to keep a piece of you with me too.”

You merely exhale, mind reeling. Any word you think of seems to evaporate each time you open your mouth.

“Maybe, when you finish it, we can hang the portrait you drew of me next to this one,” he muses. “So, at least on paper, we can be a clan of three.”

You nod fervently, your foreheads rubbing together from the rapid motion as you stroke the soft peaks of his cheekbones.

“I can’t believe you kept all of these,” you chuckle, gesturing to his wall of art. 

“Of course I did,” he says, fully grinning now, his nose playfully bumping against yours. “They’re beautiful and… they’re from you.”

A sweet sigh escapes your lips, your breath hovering in the small space between your bodies, and you see a flash of pink when his tongue pokes out to swipe a quick line between his mouth. You bite your lip, trying to force your mind to stay silent and not ruin this moment, but knowing you need to address the guilt in your heart.

“You almost died,” you say quietly, the words falling from your lips in broken pieces and shattering on the floor.

“But I didn’t,” he responds, his brown eyes staring directly into yours. “You healed me.”

“I should have...” you start, not knowing how to finish the statement because, even now, you’re clueless as to what you could have done differently. “I should have been more careful. Maybe if I hadn’t gotten caught, you wouldn’t have been hurt.”

“I’m used to it,” he sighs.

“Well, you shouldn’t be,” you whisper. “Neither should you.”

It stuns you, causing you to pull your face away just slightly, ignoring the way your skin screams to touch his again.

Pain is universal except to those who harden themselves to it and let calluses develop. This is a natural defense. You know this. But the thing is, pain is protection too, another security the body uses to protect itself. From harm. It’s ironic how the ones who feel the least amount of pain carry the largest amount of suffering.

“You shouldn’t have gotten hurt,” you continue, walking over to his bed to sit on the edge. “I promised I’d take care of you.”

This time, he’s stunned. Take care of him?  

“You almost died, Din. You shouldn’t have even gotten hurt. I don’t know what I would do…”

“I’m right here, ner kar’ta,” he whispers, moving towards the bed and kneeling between your legs. He cradles your jaw, lifting your gaze to meet his eyes. “I’m right here.”

“You almost weren’t,” you say, your lip trembling below his thumb.

“I’m here. With you,” he says, confident. “I always will be, I promise.”

“Din, you can’t promise—”

“I just did.”

As you look into his eyes, you see a fire that tells you this is more than a promise. It’s more than a tenet of the Mandalorians’ honor and you feel it in your bones. He would traverse every system, tear apart the galaxy, fall to his knees to keep it. This is more than a promise. It’s a vow.

It feels like entering a new atmosphere, gravity pulling you into his orbit until your lips meet his, the same way the horizon of Tatooine meets twin suns each evening. He’s soft — so soft — and solid and still, allowing you to release the worry and trauma you’ve been shouldering on your own against his eager lips. You capture his upper lip, press a chaste peck there, exhale, kiss his lower lip, then breathe him in.

When you pull back by an inch, his body sways toward yours like a pendulum, his eyes closed dreamily as he waits for your lips to return to his.

“Din,” you whisper, a single tear rolling down your cheek as you cup his face between your hands like he’s delicate and holy. “Ner kar’ta,” you call him.

He opens his eyes, finding yours glazed with something he’s never seen before but knows is mirrored in his own irises.

“How do you say ‘I love you’ in Mando’a?” 

This time, it’s his lips crashing into yours first, capturing your gasp on his tongue. His fingers card through your hair and find a resting place at the base of your head, nails scratching lightly and pulling sweet songs from your mouth. His other hand settles on the crook of your neck, his thumb drawing circles over your clavicle before gliding over your shoulder, then along the side of your waist, finally falling to the small of your back. A gentle pressure pulls you closer to the edge of the mattress where Din still kneels between your thighs, making you gasp again. But he swallows the sound with his mouth, his tongue eagerly licking past your lips. You dig your fingers into his hair and wrap your legs around his torso to stay balanced, though your mind is drunk on his taste and dizzy on his scent filling your lungs. 

All you know is him. 

The hand on your back grazes across your hip, drags a slow line over the top of your thigh, and squeezes once. Then, you feel fingers tickle behind your knee. In one swift motion, Din pulls your leg higher around him and gently pushes you backward, the hand on your head guiding you as you fall onto the pillow.

He pulls away panting, letting you catch your breath as he takes the opportunity to rake his eyes over your body spread out beneath him. 

You do the same, letting your fingers follow the same path as your eyes. He looks positively wrecked, hair sticking up from where you’d pulled it, pupils dilated, his lips pink and perfectly swollen. His breaths seem to come out more labored — but whether from your touch or the shameless way your eyes drink him in, you don’t know. All you know is the flushed skin below his jaw, how it draws your attention to the strong cords of muscle that run up the length of his neck, how his Adam’s apple bobs slowly below your featherlight finger when he swallows.

As your hands continue their exploration, Din’s thumb tickles your cheek with a tenderness that matches the look in his eyes. The shimmering dust of stars glistens in his irises as he gazes upon you like you’re… 

“Mesh’la,” he whispers, brushing a strand of hair behind your ear.

“I could say the same about you,” you grin, drawing him back toward you and feeling his smile against your lips.

He settles his weight between your legs, moaning into your mouth when you raise your hips to grind against him. He gives you beautiful, desperate noises and you greedily capture each one with your lips. As he kisses you, your nails scrape down his back, his muscles tensing and rippling under your touch until you find the hem of his shirt. You tug on it once, twice, before he’s finally sitting back and pulling it over his head. Not wanting to have to separate yourself from him again, you remove your top at the same time, leaving you both exposed from the waist up. When his face emerges from the neck of his shirt, he looks down and stills, and somehow, you feel infinitely more beautiful under his lustful gaze.

He attaches your lips again, craving your taste like a famine-starved man, ravenous hands exploring new skin as yours leave crescent moons across his back. He kisses your lips, your cheeks, licks below your ear, sucks under your jaw, down your neck, above your breasts — tasting every soft plane with a hunter’s diligence until you’re soft and pliant below him, bending while he bows.

He rocks into you, eliciting gasps from both your lips. Desperately, you scratch impatiently at the skin above his waistband, your hands attempting to push the material down to no avail. 

“What do you want?” He asks, pleads against your mouth, moaning when you hold his lower lip between your teeth and release it with a slow scrape.

“Want these off,” you mutter against his cheek, his scruff scratching over your lips deliciously. “Want you.”

That’s all he needs before he unbuttons his trousers, kissing you deeper as he bares himself completely to you. 

“Now you,” he whispers, his lips dragging down your body and hovering over your belly, pressing languid kisses to each hip, and biting the skin lower down as he removes your clothes. His breath ghosts over your heat and sends a shudder up your spine, making you arch toward him. His lips roam the soft skin of your thigh, tantalizingly tracing his tongue up toward where you throb for him, and then moving back down leaving you writhing with desire. He gives the same treatment to the other thigh, teasing you with his soft lips until you’re groaning and desperate beneath him.

A surprisingly deft finger opens you to him and your mouth drops agape without a word, pleasure lodged in your throat until he curls his finger just so, pulling the wanton sounds from your lips. As you become more vocal, he strokes you more eagerly, his other hand massaging the plush skin of your body wherever he can reach, watching your face with fascination as he stokes a fire in your belly.

Just as he’s about to put his mouth on you, he feels your fingers tugging his hair, pulling him upward until your lips meld together once more.

“Need you.” The words come out as a growl into his mouth and you lift your hips pointedly to meet his. He hisses at the friction, nodding in understanding when you say, “Now.”

He enters slowly, feeling you stretch around him and engulf him in a heat he never wants to escape. It feels like a release of pressure even as pressure begins to build between your legs. It’s pain and pleasure and perfection all at once. He fills you so completely and he can’t help but think:

“Meant for me.” 

He breathes the words out loud into your skin, lips trailing a burning path down your throat as he moves inside you, wicked sounds falling from your tongue when he hits a spot that has you seeing stars.

“What?” You gasp, but he doesn’t seem to hear.

Din kisses you everywhere he can reach, one hand interlocked with yours next to your head while the other pulls your leg higher and tighter around his back, giving him access to parts of you he gets to explore for the first time. It makes him think about the galaxies that always reflect in your eyes and how he’s getting to discover each one of them with you now. 

“Or maybe,” he continues his previous thought, a sweet, gentle kiss placed over your heart. “Meant for you.”

His pace quickens and you dig your nails into his shoulders as an invisible coil tightens in your belly. He continues speaking low in your ear, some of the words foreign and others in Basic, though you still can’t understand for the life of you when he’s right there. As his thrusts become more erratic, your core ignites, and intense heat blossoms over your entire body like a flower. And it’s Din plucking each petal until all that’s left in your mind is one singular truth: he loves me. Your eyes screw shut and your toes curl and you’re out of breath and you feel heavy and light at the same time. He moans a ragged sound when he feels you reach your peak, squeezing him until he’s falling over the precipice right after you.

The room is awash in heavy breathing, a fiery warmth scorching every inch of your naked skin as you both pant to catch your breath. You’d like to stay like this forever, you think. No clothes, simply covered in Din. But eventually, he slowly pulls himself out of you and an aching, empty feeling settles in your stomach that screams for him to come back. 

He hovers above you, not wanting to crush you with the immense weight he feels. But he can’t fight you when your hands wrap around his neck and mold his smile against yours, lips moving together like you can’t get enough.

You hold each other in silence, heated kisses cooling off into chaste pecks only when it feels too long since the last. Your breaths slow to a peaceful rhythm, hearts beating in time with each other to a secret song only you two know.

“Ni kar'tayli gar darasuum,” he breathes, the flight of his words spinning around the shell of your ear raises goosebumps on your skin. 

“What does that mean?” You ask, your hand cupping his warm cheek.

When he looks at you, he sees ferocity, forgiveness, a future, a family. For so long, he never thought he could feel anything close to this. Then, he met Grogu and, just as quickly, had to say goodbye. But when you look at him with such goodness and grace — all he can think of is how he hopes you’ll stay looking at him like this until he dies.

“‘I love you,’” he answers. "Forever."

[READ EPILOGUE HERE]

End Note: We're almost at the end! I just have an epilogue planned. But hey, if you have any headcanons you'd like to see happen in this series, please send them my way! Maybe some blurbs could be arranged :) Mando’a Glossary: Cuyan = survivor [koo-YAHN] Kotep = brave [KOH-tehp] Mirdala = clever [MEER-dah-lah] Kotyc = strong [koh-TEESH] Ner kar’ta = My heart (kar’ta = heart [kah-ROH-ta]; ner = my [nair]) Mesh'la = beautiful [MAYSH`lah] Ni kar'tayli gar darasuum. = I know you forever [nee kar-TILE garh dah-RAH-soom] ⎿ “It's the same word as 'to know,' 'to hold in the heart,' kar'taylir. But you add darasuum, ‘forever,’ and it becomes something rather different.” — Republic Commando: Triple Zero

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[terzos-edibles]

Silver Linings

4. High Tide, Low Tide

Previous: Hello Bluebird, Hello Robin Summary: Din doesn't feel great. He has been shot and bitten. His ego is bruised. But he can't lay in bed - something is coming, and he needs to get both himself and the doctor out of there. Words: 1.8k Rated mature: stormtrooper violence, lots of violence, burning of a village, language, minor character death, Din is a grumpy Gus.

“Headed up, down the river Oh, Lord, I feel the reveling I feel a change on the rise.” - Change On The Rise, Avi Kaplan

Laasko Village -

Din didn’t know how long he had been asleep. When he finally cracked his eyes open, and he realized he was in a far comfier bed than his own on his ship. He grunted and sat up, taking a peek outside the window to gather his surroundings.

The usual clouds that hung heavy in the sky had made way for an unusually clear night. Ibaar’s two moons hung in the sky, casting moonlight over the village. Even from his small window, Din could see the brightness of the galaxy splashed across the sky like someone had spilled a bucket of stars.

Two things caught his attention as he shifted his gaze back away from the window. One - he really had to take a piss, and two - he was starving, and his stomach let him know about it. He eyed the cold soup, knowing that it would be better than nothing, and he had had worse before. Still, he didn’t want to drink it on a very full bladder. He stood up, reaching out to grasp anything in reach. The back of his thigh was on fire, and he had to stifle an involuntary grunt of pain as he put weight on it. The numbing had long since worn off. He took a ginger step forward. Alright. He could do this.

Slowly but surely, he made his way to the bathroom. The first stop was peeing - he pressed his hand against the bathroom wall behind the toilet to steady himself. The next order of business was washing his hands and face. He reached up, pulling his helmet off, and set it on the edge of the sink. He flipped the water on, washing his hands and leaning down to splash water on his face. Glancing up in the mirror, he felt like he looked - like a mudhorn had charged him down again. Dark circles rested under his eyes, and it had been a few days since he had been able to trim his beard. He took a paper towel from the dispenser next to him and patted his face dry, trying to avoid the man staring back at him the best he could.

The man that stared back at him was haunted.

He grabbed his helmet, moving a little too quickly out of the bathroom, grunting as he grabbed the doorframe to steady himself. He took a few more ginger steps and sat back down on his bed, eyeing the soup. He picked up the bowl, bringing it to his lips and taking a sip.

Nope.

The cold broth nearly made him gag. Instead, he set the bowl down, picked up the hunk of bread, and ripped off a piece with his teeth. After chasing it with the glass of water, he put on his helmet and settled back into bed, his body tired from the trip.

——-

A loud crash of thunder startled Din awake. He couldn’t have been asleep for more than a few hours. The clear night had given way, once again, to Ibaar’s ever-persistent thunderstorms. Lightning flashed as rain pelted the window, and he settled back into bed.

Another roll of thunder and a flash of lighting.

Except that wasn’t thunder, and the lighting grew brighter - burning orange.

It was an attack on the village.

Din moved, more on instinct than anything else. His armor and the rest of his clothes had been neatly stacked on a nearby chair, his amban rifle and beskar spear leaning up against the wall. His leg was screaming, and his side was protesting every move he made. Just like a thousand times before, he got his clothes and armor on in what felt like record time.

He moved to the door of his room, his amban rifle ready in case there had already been a breach. With his luck, the door would be locked, that had been par for the course since he had gotten to this fucking village, and - the door slid open.

“Huh,” came his reply as he slipped out of the room. There was another explosion followed by screaming, all too close for comfort.

Din made his way into the clinic, a relieved sigh escaping his lips. He didn’t know why he was thankful the doctor hadn’t chosen to go home that night and instead fell asleep at her workstation. Her head resting on her arms, her lab coat was draped over the back of her chair. She had a bag resting by her feet - it looked as though she had been on her way out but got caught up by something.

Another explosion came, this time shaking the clinic. Bacta sloshed in the tanks. Blaster fire could be heard right outside.

He looked back at the doctor, surprised and a little annoyed that she was still asleep. He moved to her, his hand going to her shoulder as he attempted to shake her awake.

Maker, this woman could sleep through anything.

Finally, after a rather forceful shake, she lifted her head, blinking as she looked up at him - confusion written all over her face.

“We need to go,” he told her, watching as she processed what was going on.

Shit, what was her name?

Finally, after a long second, it seemed to click for her, and she was grabbing her backpack, slinging it over her shoulders.

“We can’t go out through the front,” he said, his voice low. There seemed to be a lull in both the thunder and the violence outside, and an eerie calm had overtaken the clinic.

She nodded. “The clinic is set into the mountain,” she replied, looking up at him with a furrowed brow. “There really isn’t a back-“

The doctor was cut off by a loud banging, and a roar of flames lit up the clinic’s lobby. Din grabbed her upper arm, pulling her behind one of the storage cabinets. He reached down, pulling a slug from the holster on his boot. He loaded it into his rifle after pulling it back from around his shoulder. He loaded it up, priming it. They would need to go out through the front, which meant he would need to clear a path. He pulled another slug from his boot, handing it back to the doctor. “Hold this for me.” He whispered, and she closed her fingers over it. There was a pause and then the distinct mechanical shuffling of a droid.

“Who is knocking at this hour!” A9 called, clearly oblivious to the danger outside. Maker, he hated droids.

He could hear the doctor make a small noise from behind him, reaching out as though to try and use the force to stop him like Grogu trying to pull the ball from Din’s hand.

Before either of them could stop the droid, the door slid open and a stormtrooper followed by an incinerator trooper barreled into him. A9 fell back with a loud clang! And the stormtrooper pointed his blaster at A9’s head, pulling the trigger. The doctor made an involuntary yelp, instantly covering her hand with her mouth. The troopers turned, one looking at the other.

“Search for the doctor, kill anyone else. Then let’s torch this place,” he ordered the incinerator trooper.

Din charged his amban, immediately taking the shot. The slug hit the trooper in the chest, and despite the plastoid, the trooper’s body flipped once in the air before exploding into ash. He reached behind him, and the doctor handed him the slug he had passed her. He loaded it, and in one fluid motion, he had it in his rifle and fired it just as the incinerator trooper raised the nozzle on his flame thrower. The trooper exploded just as the one before had.

“Follow me,” Din ordered, slinging his rifle back over his back and pulling his beskar spear over his shoulder.

The pair made their way out of the clinic, and he saw the doctor stop out of the corner of his eye. The woman was staring, slack-jawed as she watched two troopers throw the doctor’s assistant onto a pile of bodies - silhouetted by the flames of the fire.

The sun was rising now, casting a pink hue over the sky - marred by smoke and flame of the burning village below. While the clinic may have been carved into the mountain, other homes around them were made with typical materials - and they were starting to come down. They needed to move. Now.

“Come on, doctor, if we want to live, we have to go,” Din said as he took the woman’s wrist and tugged her along.

She gaped at him for a moment, most likely trying to process what he had said. “We don’t have time. Come on,” he said, wondering just how many times he would have to tell her to get with it. He understood that she was most likely in shock. An attack on a village and seeing people important to you was startling. He didn’t want to diminish what she was feeling, but if they held out any longer, both of them would be dead. And as she put it, she did a good job on his sutures. He didn’t want them to burn up in a fiery inferno.

They needed to get to a speeder to get back to the docking bay; without one, the trip would be long and dangerous. The Empire would be patrolling more heavily now for people who fled in the chaos, and they wouldn’t stand a chance against TIE fighters on strafing runs.

They continued to run, the flames lifting higher and the explosions fading as they made their way out of the village. Once or twice they had to dodge out of the way of a collapsing building. Any troopers they met on their way got to know a beskar spear very intimately. The doctor tripped over a piece of fallen rubble, her shins, and palms a bloody mess, as he grabbed her upper arm and drug her to her feet.

Eventually, Din found the speeder he had been looking for - an old, faded brown X-37 land speeder. He threw his spear into the passenger seat and settled down into the driver’s seat. Satisfied the doctor was in the back seat, he flipped on the ignition, praying to the maker that it actually had fuel in it.

After a beat, it powered on.

“We need to go,” he heard the doctor behind him say, her voice breaking. He turned in his seat, eyes going wide behind his helmet. A transport was dropping an AT-ST into the middle of the village. There was no hope left for these villagers. They and their marshal were reaping what they sowed, and he found it hard to be sympathetic even though he was hired to poke the proverbial hornet’s nest.

“Hold on.” ** Chapter 5: In A World Upside Down Taglist: @novemberrain221, @blackdogdesignuk, @mistyfur5, @thepoisonofgod, @kesskirata, @hayley-the-comet, @absurdthirst @lellowberry

[greaterawarness]

What's Left Ch. 3 "Old Friends"

(Kix goes with the Ghost crew to investigate if the owner of this bar knows where Rex's son is. Things don't go as planned.)

Kix can feel their eyes on him. A glance here, the dart of the eyes there, and then there’s the nautolan who is content to just stare blatantly at Kix. All attempts to converse with him went out the porthole when Kix failed to be much of a conversationalist. He would answer their eager questions with short sometimes one word replies. The more they spoke the more Kix felt like he couldn’t breathe. He wasn’t in a place where he can look back on the good old days and smile. It was still a fresh wound that hadn’t even begun to heal yet. He hoped they understood when they slowly stopped asking questions and started facing forward in their seats. Right now, they were the closest thing to Rex he was going to get.

“We’re coming up on Coruscant now.” Azil announces. Kix finally found out that she’s a Lasat. Caleb whispered it to him when he was caught staring for to long. Reveth shifts her weight but doesn’t uncross her arms. She hasn’t spoken much since the captain left them on the Ghost. Pendewqell mutters under his breath from time to time but Kix doubted anyone could hear it. Reveth’s stone expression was a constant reminder that they aren’t here to make friends. This was a retrieval mission for the memory core. They were then to report back to the Shrike hopefully with this kid Fives in hand. But Kix wondered if Sidon actually planned on keeping his word to Maz. Kix leans on his knees and delves deeper into his thoughts. What if the Corsair crew wasn’t his only option now? These people knew Rex. Maybe they would take him in? his stomach twists. Maybe they’ll take pity on me?A spark of anger spreads heat across his face. He has to tap his foot and let out a long breath to feel normal again.

“Emmy, you stay with the ship just in case we need a speedy getaway.” Jacen instructs when the Ghost id docked. The nautolan nods, still not saying a word. Kix flinches when the orange droid, Chopper, speeds past him. Caleb elbows Kix.

“He grows on you, trust me.” He winks before pulling on his Mandalorian helmet. Kix glances at Reveth who just shrugs. They follow Jacen off the Ghost and out into the Coruscant Underworld. When Kix first steps off the ship ramp, he takes a moment to glance up at all the starships floating in and out of the large docking tunnels. Even though he was born and raised on Kamino and everything he loved is most likely gone or changed into something unrecognizable to him, he can’t help thinking, I’m home.

“Alright, stay close. The bar isn’t to far from here.” Jacen calls from the front of the group. Kix snaps out of his gaze when Pendewqell shoves him forward. He stumbles slightly and shoots a look over his shoulder, but Pendewqell doesn’t seemed fazed. Kix takes everything in. The poorly lit walking paths plotted with filth and trash. The almost nauseating stench of ship exhaust and every now and then the putrid stench of sewage. But what he really enjoyed was the starship traffic overhead that forms a river of lights in the sky. While taking in the sights of the city he once called home, he almost doesn’t notice a hand attempt to pickpocket him. Kix reacts quickly, catching the thief’s hand and pulling them away from his body. The boy no older then 16 looks flustered by getting caught before ultimately running away.

“Got to be careful on the streets,” Azil says when they continue walking, “Coruscant used to be a respected planet. But now its fallen to crime syndicates.”

“How is that possible?” Kix frowns as he walks. She shrugs with the shake of her head.

“After the Empire fell it went back to being peaceful but…” she trails off.

“But then the First Order showed up and now this place is as lawless as ever.” Caleb finishes for her. Kix doesn’t push the subject any further. He’s already spotted a few stormtroopers peppered into the crowds. The first time he ever saw one he mistook it for a clone trooper. The sudden burst of excitement and relief to not be alone that was immediately extinguished when he heard the strangers voice speak back to him. The clones are gone. Now, he’s all that’s left.

It doesn’t take long to make it to their destination. Kix is surprised to see how large the bar is. it looks more like a warehouse then a place to get drinks. A few groups of people are loitering out front around several parked speeders. Kix follows silently behind the Ghost crew as they enter the bar.

Inside it’s almost pitch black except for the neon paint spread along the walls, floors, and ceilings. The mass of people dancing to the overly loud music all wear some form of brightly colored fabric that lights up like the paint. Some have symbols painted on their bodies if only to have something that glowed in the dark. Kix realizes the paint on Caleb ignites in the dark like everything else. He sticks closer to the others. It would be way to easy to get lost in a place like this.

They eventually find a long bar that stretches the length of the back wall with several bartenders scattered about to serve as many people as possible. Kix sees Jacen peering at each bartender before shaking his head. Azil gstures to the second floor that looks down at the main horde of dancing people. They make their way to one of the two stairs and begin climbing. Each stair is painted a different color, forming a rainbow all the way to the top. the second floor is much less crowded. There are sectioned off areas with cushioned benches and private tables. They pass one man that is surround by women of different species and the next is a group of men throwing a bachelor party. Kix notices a much smaller bar in the corner. Only one man stands to serve drinks. When they approach the small bar, the bartender doesn’t look up from drying a glass.

“What do you want?” his voice is low, but it carries over the music. Jacen takes a seat on one of the five barstools. The man behind the bar is a Kiffar. His clan tattoo is a gold line running down his forehead, nose, lips, and chin with three gold dots marked under his left eye. He is completely different then the other bartenders. While the others wear vests that glow different colors in the dark, he only wears dark clothes. He has a long jacket that rests just past his shoulders revealing gold tattoos that cover his left shoulder and travel down his arm to where Kix could no longer see. The top of his dreads is pulled back into a bun while the lower part is let to fall below his shoulders.

“I’m looking for my cousin.” Jacen tries to speak loud with out shouting. The man finally sets the glass down and meets Jacen’s eyes. He reaches under the bar and pulls out a shot glass before pouring blue neon liquid to its brim. He slides it towards Jacen.

“What makes you think I know where he is?” the man tilts his head but shows no emotion.

Jacen leans over the bar. “He’s in trouble Qell.”

When the man, Qell, doesn’t react in any way, Reveth pushes her way forward. She takes the shot meant for Jacen and downs it in one go. She slams the glass on the table and meets Qell’s eyes. “The Crimson Corsair is looking for him. You can tell us what you know, or things can get messy.”

Something in his eyes change. Qell leans shifts his weight while mulling it over. He crosses his arms and stares at the floor with his lips pressed into a thin line. After a moment he gives a small nod.

“Fine,” he says making Jacen’s shoulders relax. Kix glances at Caleb and Azil. They keep their guard up. “I’ll go get him.”

“Alright,” Jacen breathes. When Qell disappears through a hidden door by the bar, Kix gets an uneasiness deep in his gut. “I told you he’d do the right thing.”

Azil gives a snort and begins pacing the length of the small bar. “We’ll see…”

While they wait for Qell to supposedly retrieve Fives for them, Kix pears down at the dancing crowd. The crowd swells and falls like uneven ripples across water. There may have been a time where he would want to join them. Especially if Jesse and Hardcase talked him into it. They were good at that. His thoughts are interrupted by a loud siren blaring through the building. He covers his ears, wincing. Down below, he can make out two people running through the crowds dispersing something to each patron. After a moment he realizes they’re masks. He quickly whips his head towards the people in the private areas to see them sitting comfortably on the benches all wearing masks that glow different neon colors.

“What’s going on?” Pendewqell screams over the siren.

“Shit.” Caleb curses under his breath. Kix follows his eyes and see even the bartenders are now wearing masks. All of their masks glow red. Kix flinches when a large, animated eyes and mouth appears on the large wall overlooking the crowds.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” the loud animated voice speaks commanding everyone’s attention. Kix reaches for his blaster but only grasps at air. He peeks over his shoulder to see his blaster is gone. The others catch on and find that their blasters are missing as well. “Now is the moment you’ve all been waiting for! Remember to keep your masks on at all times and to act responsibly! If you need assistance at any moment, please do not hesitate to hit the red button on the side of your masks or to reach out to anyone wearing a red mask!”

“What does that mean?” Azil asks before yelling. “What does that mean?”

The eyes and mouth disappear. A large red 10 appears on the wall. Everyone below begins to chant out the countdown.

“We don’t have weapons Jacen.” Caleb hisses. Jacen stands next to everyone unsure of what to do.

“We don’t know what its counting down to! It might not be anything bad.” Jacen doesn’t sound convincing.

“… 5… 4… 3… 2…” The crowd continues chanting. Kix holds his breath. Everything in him tells him to run. Then the crowd screams, “… 1!”

At first, nothing happens. Then the lights flip on causing Kix and the others to flinch and groan at the sudden brightness. This has been happening a lot to Kix. But when the lights shut off again a horn is blown and clouds of color rain down on everything. The music is blaring so loudly that Kix can feel it in his chest. the people go nuts dancing in the clouds of color and soon colorful foam appears on the floor. Kix and the others all give a semi embarrassed “Oh.”

“My blaster is still missing!” Reveth hisses through clenched teeth as if to remind them that this wasn’t innocent at all. Kix turns to respond to her but suddenly feels a blow against the center of his shoulder blades. He doesn’t fully realize what’s happening until he hits the ground. On the first floor. He lets out a long groan and then cough when the smoke gets into his lungs. Its not the same type of smoke that the kid Fives used on him, but it still made breathing difficult. He struggles not to slip on the foam that now covers the floor. A torguta man walks towards him wearing a red mask. Kix holds out a hand, assuming he’s here to assist him but is then kicked in the chest and sent sliding across the floor.

He has to use a table currently occupied by a group of women to get to his feet. They stare at him blankly, so he bows his head at them and goes, “Ladies.”

He barely has time to adjust to standing again when the next hit comes. This time he’s able to lift his arms and shield himself. When the man swings a leg, Kix manages to catch it throw the man off balance. He throws a punch himself but the man dodges. The smoke stings his eyes, and he coughs so hard his lungs ache. This gives the man another opening. The man’s boot collides with the side of Kix’s head sending him flying to the floor again. This time when he tries to get to his feet, he waits. When he hears the man approaching, Kix pulls a knife, one he just remembered he had, and swings at the man. The man tries to dodge but Kix is able to plunge it into his thigh. The man lets out a painful scream before punching the side of Kix’s head. When Kix no longer sees two of everything, the man is gone.

Kix stumbles to his feet, wincing at the throbbing in his head and the ache in his back from his fall. He glances towards the second floor. Azil is draped over the side rails, Jacen is currently getting to his feet, and Pendewqell coughs hysterically into his arm from the floor. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Reveth and Caleb still in the midst of battle. Qell and a female Mikkian fight off Caleb and Reveth on the rainbow stairs. He begins stumbling towards them, but the crowd is to pact together and he couldn’t manage his way through. More colorful smoke rains down obstructing his view of their fighting. He coughs harder and waves the smoke away.

Hands shove Kix into someone behind him. Qell runs past with the Mikkian woman. Kix gladly runs after them when he sees their headed for the exit, but he’s trapped in the crowd. They jump and chant from under their masks completely unaware of what’s happening. Kix coughs harder, feeling himself curl into himself. Hands push him through the crowd. Reveth appears, now covered in paint and bruises. She helps him through the dancing crowd and to the exit.

The fall through the doors, landing on the ground. Both coughs roughly towards the ground. They crawl further away from the entrance so they can sit themselves up against the building walls. Some of the loiterers outside stare at them judgingly. When the doors burst open again, it’s the Ghost crew and Pendewqell. Caleb is the only one who seems fine. His Mandalorian helmet saved him from the smoke.

“Well,” Jacen’s voice is hoarse, and he tries to keep himself from cough anymore. “That could have gone better.”

“No shit.” Reveth gets to her feet. She slams the side of her fist against the bar wall in frustration.

“We should get back to the ship.” Azil’s voice is strained but no one argues. Each of them is covered in the colorful smoke. They leave a trail of neon footprints as they make their way through the city. They don’t say a word. Each of them is pissed and while they won’t admit it, embarrassed. When they make their way into the port where the Ghost is docked, they freeze.

Panels from the ghost lay on the floor with bolts and nails rolling around. A part of the ramp lies flat on the ground while the rest hangs in the air. Bits and pieces of the Ghost are strewn throughout the dock. Jacen walks forward, hands squeezed into tight fists. A ship hovers above the Ghost with wires tethered down to the hyperdrive being lifted from the ship. on top is two Jawas. Both waves enthusiastically. The sound of thrusters draws their attention to Qell who is lifting up to the Jawas. He glares down at them and gives a low laugh.

“I’ll give Fives your regards!” he shouts before the ship pulls them away.

***

When Qell is safely in the ship, he gives a long low sigh. He pulls his mask off and tosses it onto the couch that curves into one of the ships corners. The twins push past him while bickering over their new hyperdrive.

“Hey, Gigi, Suzu, cut it out.” His voice reveals how exhausted he really is. “Go make sure Chop doesn’t need any help.” The two Jawas nods and shuffle off to find Chop. Qell takes this moment to rub his face. When the ship doors open, Calli steps into the room. She’s doesn’t take her eyes off the datapad that’s in her hands.

“You okay?” Qell places his large blaster on the table by the couch. When she doesn’t respond or even acknowledge him, he asks again. This time she flinches and meets his eyes.

“What?”

Qell gives a soft laugh before saying, “Are you injured?”

“Oh,” her pink nose wrinkles at such a thought, “no, I’m fine. Chop on the other hand got stabbed in the leg.”

“Of course he did.” Qell rolls his eyes. Calli begins walks towards another set of doors before Qell speaks up again. “How is he?”

She pauses, not looking back at him. her voice is forcefully neatrul. “The same.”

When she disappears through the ship doors, he feels the quietness settle. It’s a peaceful quiet but it gnaws at the pit in his stomach. The pit formed by the worry that’s been building up little by little with every passing day. He squeezes his eyes shut, trying to ease the worry back down. When the ship doors open again, Chop walks out, wearing an apron and rubber gloves that stretch to his elbows.

“What are you doing?” Qell sighs when the torguta shuffles through cabinets while mumbling to himself.

Chop pauses to stare at him and then, as if it wasn’t clear enough, lifts his rubbered hands and says, “Dishes.”

“Dammit Chop! Go find Calli and get your leg patched up!” Qell shouts but there’s no real anger behind it. Chop hops from one thought to the other usually before Qell has time to question his first one. Chop almost looks confused before glancing down at his leg.

“Oh, right.” He says. “I’ll go find Calli.”

Qell shakes his head while watching him leave. Not 10 minutes ago he was fighting in the bar. Now he’s trying to do the dishes with a bleeding leg. Qell decides that this is enough for one day. Calli can hold it down long enough for him to get some rest.

When the doors part, he’s greeted by his dark room. The only light is from Fifi’s work bench lamp. He can’t help but eye the memory core sitting in the center. He forces his eyes away and pulls his coat off. He hangs it in his closet before kicking off his shoes and then lining them neatly with his others. He notices some of Fifi’s clothes strewn around and gathers them in his arms before dropping them into the dirty hamper. He rubs the back of his neck and sits on the edge of the bed. The lump behind him shifts.

“You know,” he starts softly, “Your cousin came looking for you.”

He waits for some form of response. The only thing he gets is another shift from under the blankets. He can spot a few strands of blonde hair peeking from under the covers. Qell stares at his hands. He’s not sure how much he should tell him. At least right now. Fifi gets in these moods. Sometimes he’s really up and feels like he can do almost anything. Things like still a memory core from the fuckingCrimson Corsair. And then there are times like this. The times where getting out of bed is next to impossible. Qell presses his lips together and squeezes his eyes shut before letting out a breath and relaxing his shoulders. He'll wait until Fifi feels better. Then they’ll come up with a game plan.

“I’m sorry.” Fifi’s voice is small. Qell looks back at the mass of blankets and pillows. He crawls over and peels the covers back just enough for him to plant a soft kiss on the top of the blonde head.

“It’s alright. Get some rest.” Qell speaks softly. “When you feel better, we’ll figure out the next phase of the plan.”

He doesn’t stir anymore under the blankets. Qell lets the covers fall back over his hair. He thinks back to the red twi’lek. And that man. The one that almost looked like Fifi. He glances at Fifi’s helmet that sits in its usual place on top of Fifi’s dresser. The clones are gone. He reminds himself. There was no way that he was a clone. A child of a clone? Yes. But even as he tells himself this, he can’t help but feel the nervous pit in his stomach grow.

(I know it might be confusing that Rex's kid is named Fives so I'm gonna try and have them call him by some nicknames. I just can't see how Rex wouldn't name his kid after Fives though, so I'm probably gonna keep the name.)

Read full story HERE on Ao3!

[jbbuckybarnes]

Concerned Parents

Pairing: Din Djarin x Reader Desc: To get the child back after it was taken from you, Din has to remove the helmet to get into a place to find out where he was taken. He didn‘t think you‘d have to see him AND kiss him to keep the cover up. Warnings: flirting, sexual references, not proofread

„They won‘t let you into that place with your helmet on. It‘s like the Hutts but worse and more uptight.“ Fennec had explained about the shady looking hut you were all looking at. „I‘ll go in alone, you‘re my backup.“ Din looked at you, Fennec and Boba. Your eyes widened but you kept your mouth shut. You all wanted the baby, whatever it takes. Everyone agreed to his plan. Fennec and Boba would take long range, you‘d be close enough to barge in, just in case all hell broke loose. He left his visible armor in Boba‘s ship, put something on over his chest plate and hid his face under a cloth wrapped around his face, a thinner material around his eyes that he could look through. „Let‘s go.“

Fennec went on her position, Boba on the opposite hill. You followed a couple dozen steps behind Mando You saw him starting to remove his headwrap that he put on for around all of you. Out of respect you looked around instead, but you could stop letting your eyes wander past him, noticing brown fluffy hair. You wondered how it looked this good after all these hours under a helmet. You sat down under a lamp in earshot of the hut, noticing his deep voice talking to get into the place. A grunt of agreement came back. With a touch against your ear you started hearing out what was going on inside. „I heard you could lead me to any imperial ship.“ You finally made out his voice out of all of them. „You heard right. For the right price I‘ll be able to locate almost any ship.“ A scratchy voice answered. „I only have this amount of credits, but I know the ship has cargo worth more than two dozen times of it.“ You heard a grunt and a commotion. „You take me for someone taking upfront payment and leaving with the rest?“ He asked in a calmer voice. „I never break my part of a contract. I‘m a bounty hunter.“ „Oh?“ You sighed and got up, „You‘re an idiot. That‘s what you are.“ The weird tentacle guy at the entrance looked you up and down and then nodded to let you in. „We don‘t really like your kind here.“ „I‘ll be gone and back with more. I‘m not here for a bounty. I‘m here to get something that was stolen from me by a Moff.“ You saw the big man look him up and down hesitantly, „Which one?“ „Moff Gideon.“ Now the man looked angry. „Are you kidding me? That man is dead!“ „He isn‘t, he has recently appeared on Nevarro and took someone from me.“ „Someone you say?“ „My child. And I know it isn‘t dead.“ „You‘re making stuff up, my friend.“ The guards around the man tensed up. You came closer, throwing on your charm, „Heard you talking about Moff Gideon.“ On the table in front of the guy you put down the disc with the holo message. The whole message from the Nevarro base played off. „That‘s from about a week ago.“ You looked at the guy, still trying to respect Din‘s creed. „And who are you?“ He smirked at you, looking you up and down. „A concerned mother, one could say.“ You winked at him and sat down next to Din. „You a bounty hunter too?“ He looked between you both. „Nope. Actually used to be a bounty. Let‘s just say I‘m good at stealing.“ „Odd pair. Hm.“ He looked between you both again and you put your head on Din‘s shoulder and put your arm around him. „2500 credits up front for someone that wants to take on Gideon. That‘s...I don‘t have to tell you that is a low amount of credits, but I hate that guy as much as the next person. I‘ll help you, but you‘re gonna have to give me your code, because I will put a bounty on you if you don‘t pay up.“ The man didn‘t account for possible death, but you didn‘t mention that error of mind. „Kakiu? You know what to do.“ A small thin man nodded and ran off into a backroom. You felt Din tense up under your temple and gently went over his other shoulder with your hand. „Why would he keep your child alive?“ The man was nosy, but he had a valid question. „Our child has some specific mutation about his blood that they want to experiment with. Tried to hunt us for it for a while…well, and last week they got him. Now we‘re just trying to get him back any way we can.“ The man‘s face softened a bit, „Concerned parents, cute. But do you two really think you can breach a ship that big? That‘s wishful thinking. I‘d like to see you try tho.“ „You haven‘t seen him in his element. Never seen so many dead Imps in the vicinity of one man.“ Your head went up and you went to give him a kiss on the cheek, closing your eyes for the duration to not break his creed. „Kaiku will take a while, so why don‘t you tell me about it?“ The guy leaned back. „Which time? There were like, three.“ „The best one.“ „Well, last week it is, Gideon really wanted this kid, so he sent two ships full of Imps for us. Probably 120 or more. I shot some, a friend of us shot some, but this one probably took care of two thirds of them alone. He looks pretty good in a field of dead Stormtroopers with his blaster still sizzling.“ You felt his hand grab into your thigh and put your hand on his. „You took out quite a few yourself, don‘t sell yourself too short.“ You heard Din‘s warm voice next to you. You looked into your lap, „I really just want the kid back.“ You felt his lips on your temple, „I know, darling. I know.“ „Boss, Kaiku is having a bit of trouble.“ A guard came over and the guy in front of you grumbled and excused himself. You felt a thumb caress your hand and took the arm you had around him and snaked it around his arm to have it snug against you. „D‘you think the dude wants to secretly kill us?“ He chuckled. „I wouldn‘t be surprised, sadly.“ You mumbled back. „Didn‘t have to make me look this good in front of strangers.“ He whispered to you. „I didn‘t lie for a second, you know that damn well.“ You felt his other hand under your chin. „Looking down makes you look submissive around this folk, don‘t want that, we’re getting the kid back.“ You sighed in agreement and fluttered your eyes open slowly to see dark brown ones reflect back soft, concerned and determined. „I‘m sorry.“ You whispered, he knew what you meant. „It‘s okay. Don‘t beat yourself up over it.“ He offered a small smile. The guy came back after a while, „He‘ll be done in a while. Get yourself drinks and enjoy yourself, yeah?“ You nodded and dragged Din out of his seat towards the little bar. With your hands you ordered two small drinks while he put a respectful amount of distance between the both of you again. Not too long after you were in your thoughts sipping your drink. Not noticing the man on your left. „Hey sweetpea, you here often?“ A tipsy man of another species looked at you. „Nope.“ „Wanna change that?“ You felt an arm slinging around you from behind protectively. „Nope.“ You answered with a sweet smile and leaned against the broad chest behind you. „Aww, c‘mon.“ He didn‘t give up. Usually Din would have his scary demeanor in his beskar armor, but that wasn‘t his out card this time. „Does that man make you uncomfortable, dear?“ Your heart beat a little harder at the affectionate name. „He surely doesn‘t know how to treat me right.“ You sighed before unexpectedly being turned around. You let out a giggle and put your arms around his neck, „Now this guy is way better.“ He softened at your slightly tipsy behavior, not that he didn‘t enjoy the whole front of being partners in the first place. No. He absolutely didn‘t like that. At all. It was horrible. Super bad. „Oh, is he?“ The drunken guy was still commenting in. „Yeah.“ You whispered and Din didn‘t quite know which god put him into this situation, but suddenly his lips were on yours and he hated himself for liking it. He knew it was wrong. He knew it was just a front. He knew he just broke his creed for his child. He hated that he liked what his brain just decided to do. Someone cleared their throat next to you and you went apart, looking at the boss here. He handed you a data stick, „Gonna put it right on your ships control panel. Now I‘d like your code.“ Din obliged to the terms and gave him his code, you didn‘t know if it really was, but he gave one. You hoped it was just one of his old bounty‘s code. „See you again when you got the rest of that money.“ He nodded at the helmetless man and got a nod back. Not too long after you were dragged out of the hut by him. You helped him with his headwrap, not saying a word. He saw the guilt written on your face, but didn‘t say anything. „Say it.“ He whispered. „I hate that I broke your creed and liked it. I hate that I liked any of it.“ You said short and firm, as if you were scolding yourself. Silence. There was nothing else you could add. That‘s all you felt right now. „I feel the same.“ He answered after a while of you walking towards the rendezvous spot. „I mean, my god you look beautiful.“ The words burst out of your deepest soul and he came to a hold to look at you with his thin cloth for his eyes removed. „And I made you look.“ He sighed, „So please don‘t put this on yourself. You were just trying to help get Grogu.“ More silence between you for the way back. „I‘m sorry for flirting with you.“ You mumbled and looked away. You were just playing your part to de-escalate. „Ouch.“ He commented. „No, no, it‘s just. I. I don‘t know. I wasn‘t supposed to do that. It wasn‘t necessary for the mission.“ You stumbled over your words. „I‘m sorry that I kissed you.“ He answered and that felt like he just put a vibroblade through your heart. „I didn‘t mind. I think.“ You didn‘t even know what was and wasn‘t okay anymore. „I‘m sorry I‘d do it again.“ He chuckled and looked over to you as you walked. „Me too.“ You smiled back at his shimmering eyes and then back to where you were going. „I would do all of this again.“ He whispered with a sigh, more to himself than you. „For someone with a tin can on your head since your teen years you kiss pretty good.“ You grinned. No comment. „And you‘re kinda more fun when there isn‘t a visor between us. I can actually see your reaction. That‘s groundbreaking. I love it.“ You chuckled. „I have a lot to think through with my creed and what I just did.“ He added. „You‘ll make the right decision.“ You said calmly, grabbing his hand and squeezing it before letting it go as you stopped at the meeting point. „The decision might be led by what you just did to my mind.“ He laughed lowly, it sounded beautiful. You looked around for Boba and Fennec, nobody in sight, so you went to his back and kissed the sliver of exposed skin there. „Cyar‘ika!“ He said with a warning tone. You didn‘t know what that meant. „I‘m sorry, I like teasing when I know I have an effect.“ „Oh, have I awakened something in you?“ „If you didn‘t notice by the way I talked about you killing Imps, yes.“ „Well, good that we‘ll have to kill some more.“

— Time Jump to End of Chapter 16

You didn‘t think someone was still coming for Grogu from the Jedi Temple. Now you stood here with no child, but a dumb saber that Bo-Katan won‘t take. Seeing him broken, helmetless, exposed, but with all this armor and that saber. That reflected your feelings somehow. You knew this had to happen, but it broke a part of you anyway and made you vulnerable. You turned to look at Din, took his head into your hands and let his forehead gently fall against yours. „It‘s okay.“ You felt him shake and pull you close to his chest. „You‘re the only thing left.“ He whispered as the rest went ahead to meet Boba. „I won‘t leave you unless you ever want me to.“ You whispered back before he grabbed your face and put his desperation for home into a kiss. „We need a new ship.“ He murmured. „I might know how to steal one.“ You chuckled and caressed his cheek. „That‘s my girl.“ His thumb went over your lower lip. Where did he learn that? Was that allowed? „You look even better when you wear everything but the helmet.“ You bit your lip. „Is that your version of distraction?“ He huffed and you nodded with a chuckle. You liked flirting too much. With that you flew back to Nevarro and got a neat little ship, stolen by you and Greef. You made sure to fill it up with cozy things, reminders of what was and signs of hope for the future. For now you‘d stay a bit on Nevarro with it. He searched the whole thing for trackers after the horror of what happened to the crest, but after a couple days he finally settled in and removed his helmet around you. „Oh, hey good-looking man in beskar, are you here often?“ You grinned from your cot when he walked into the center room of the ship. „Depends on what you want from me.“ He chuckled and shook his head. „You look pretty tense, I‘m sure I could change that.“ Now he blushed at the possibilities crossing his mind. „I‘m intrigued, cyar‘ika.“ He smirked and came closer. „I was thinking cuddling, but judging by your face you have other plans.“ You laughed and stood up to knock against his chest plate. His armor was gone shortly after, „I love this.“ You scrunched your nose and hugged him close, you really did like this. He looked so human, so warm and huggable. His gloveless hands wandered down your back, stopping for a second, before wandering where they really wanted to go. You betted with yourself that he was secretly a grabby man after what happened in that hut. Turns out you were right. With a swift motion he hoisted you up to have you wrap your legs around him. „I like this,“ He mumbled and felt you smile against his neck. „Me too.“ Your hands wandered through his hair and you felt him relax even more. He sat down on your cot with you still wrapped around him. „You, um, have nice thighs.“ He pointed out sheepishly. „You know you can grab them anytime, right?“ You asked him. „Now I do.“ He huffed and gently caressed them before giving them a squeeze. „You can touch me all you want.“ You reassured him and felt him grab you by your hips so you untangled and he could fall back onto your cot with you on top of him. „That goes for you too, cyare.“ He pulled you closer by your chin. „What does that mean?“ „Beloved. Darling. Something like that.“ Now he was the one watching you get flustered and grinned. „Oh.“ You blinked a couple times, „You‘ve been saying that a lot.“ „Of course,“ he murmured and went through your hair. „Have you ever thought about settling on a planet?“ You mumbled, laying on his chest and looking up at him. „Once or twice. I think a lot of things would catch up to me.“ His voice hummed in his chest below you. „And creating a family?“ You whispered and saw him open one of his eyes. „I had one for a while, didn‘t I?“ You smiled at him and nodded. „You still have me. I wouldn‘t mind adopting another one.“ A chuckle escaped both of you. „Maybe one that isn‘t chased by the empire.“ He laughed lowly and went over your head gently. „We could make one too one day.“ You added as casual as possible and felt him tense under you. „Not like I have that many years left to do that.“ He pointed out with a huff. „Who said it would take many years?“ You whispered and crawled up on him to nuzzle into his neckline. „Where‘d you wanna settle?“ His arms snaked around you. „Preferably somewhere that isn‘t attacked every two years.“ Your muffled voice answered. „Now where‘s the fun in that, cyar‘ika?“ You kissed his neck and heard him hold his breath. „More than enough fun to have.“ You grabbed into his hair gently and felt his fingers grab into your hips. „I see.“ He murmured and closed his eyes again to enjoy your warmth. „Home is wherever you wanna go, my dear.“ He sighed and slowly dozed off.

___

Reblog to support a content creator.

[sunlightxing]

Show Me Some Respect

After working for years as a secretary to General Hux aboard the ship, the Finalizer, life could not have been better for you.

That was until Hux informed you that Commander Kylo Ren would be joining you on that ship. Almost immediately, you both resent each other, but after being forced to spend more alone time with him, you begin to wonder, what's so bad about him after all?

Chapter 3: Following Orders

Tension rises between you and Commander Kylo Ren on your short mission to a nearby planet. However, upon returning back to the Finalizer, things begin to change between you and General Hux, and a misunderstanding lands you in hot water.

The minutes bled into hours as you impatiently waited for the stormtroopers to finish handling things on the ground. There was nothing but fire, dust, and absolute chaos visible to your gaze from the cockpit. Yet, you could not have been more bored. Of course, Commander Ren made absolutely no attempt to start any form of conversation. Instead, he sat perfectly mute in his seat, watching the violence conspire down below.

You felt guilty for constantly staring at him. One hand pressed up against the side of your face, supporting your head and neck, just to do nothing but study every part of his body. The way his chest heaved with every slow breath he took was mesmerizing, completely and utterly captivating. You wanted to speak to him, have any sort of communication, but he seemed to despise talking to you, or at the very least, despise hearing your voice. That was the worst part about it all, the mixed signals he constantly threw your way, and how he made you question every little thing.

Commander Ren suddenly engaged the ships thrusters, not giving any sort of explanation or instruction. He shot the shuttle down to the village, carefully maneuvering it over the sand dunes, and through the smog and smoke below. The ship slowly lowered itself onto the course ground below, at the very center of the others.

"You will not leave your seat. Is that understood?" Commander Ren demanded as he headed for the exit of the cockpit. His voice punctured your lungs, stabbing at every part of your soul. It hurt to hear him snap at you, the words rippling off his tongue like small knives, unrelentingly digging into wherever his gaze was placed.

You spun around in your chair, now gazing up at him. "I wasn't planning on it, sir," you responded calmly, trying to not show your obvious hatred for the tone of his voice.

Commander Ren let out another sharp, agitated huff before he stormed out of the cockpit, the door slamming behind him. You couldn't help but stare at the way his cape swayed as he moved, how it would brush over his shoulder with ever alternating step, revealing his broad shoulders and muscular physique. You smacked yourself square in the forehead as more sinful thoughts of the Commander flooded your mind, a small droplet of drool slipping through your lips. Those had to go away, or working aboard the same ship as him was going to become nearly impossible.

It seemed to be hours that you were stuck on board the shuttle, though it was probably only a couple minutes. You kept fidgeting in your seat, staring at the door in hope it would finally open to reveal the Commander, carrying on some prisoner, his breath panting as he carries himself onto the cockpit. His tired and aching body flopping into his seat, chest heaving as he took in any air he could. Your mind fluttered into thoughts of him calling you to him, making you tend to his wounds. The thought of pulling of his shirt to reveal finely chiseled muscles, then reaching for his helmet-

You slapped yourself in the face again, using that as a way to punish yourself for the thoughts and fantasies. It was beyond fucked up that you had such a strong craving for him, when all that came out of your mouth when he was around was berating insults, and the same flew from his own. He even said it himself, he didn't like you. Yet, he too must have a fair amount of pleasurable thoughts that fill his own mind, as he had acted on a few of them before. The only logical solution to stopping those strong emotions was getting away from the Commander, but it didn't look like that would be happening anytime soon.

A horrid hissing sound came from the back of the shuttle, the recognizable sound the door made when they were opened. You jumped out of your seat, running to the doorway and hurriedly opening it to see the two stormtroopers who accompanied you on board, but with no Commander. You looked at them for some answers, but they just shook their heads, pointing towards the cockpit. The fools didn't speak unless spoken to, but you doubted they were trained to answer to the likes of you.

"What?" You whispered, hoping they'd go against protocol just to give you a simple answer.

One of them went to speak, and the other responded by smack him on the back of the head. You rolled your eyes as the two troopers began to beat the ever loving shit out of each other, instead of giving you the smallest amount of answers. "Look," you stated, drawing their attention away from their small quarrel. "I just want to know where the Commander is. Can you give me that much?"

The two looked at one another, giving a nod of reassurance that only that information would be allowed to be stated, but then, a loud, and rather horrifying yell came from outside the ship.

"Uhhh, that would be the Commander," one of the troopers said, the other again smacking him on the back of the head as punishment for confusing to speak to you.

You turned back to the pair, shouting to stop another fight from ensuing. "Why is he so angry?" You demanded, hoping they'd answer that question, since they didn't technically answer the first.

"He didn't find what he wanted," the trooper answered. This time, the one who responded was the usual instigator of the fights. You went to ask the pair of them just one more question, about how much they knew about the Commander. You assumed they had worked with him several times, as they seemed used to the little tantrum he threw outside of the ship, but that would have to wait for another time.

Commander Ren came marching onboard the ship, his lightsaber fully ignited. The flashing, blood curdling sizzle of the electric flame sensing you tumbling back in fear. Upon seeing your reaction, or just you in general, he unsheathed the saber, placing it promptly at his side.

"What are you doing down here?" He demanded, his voice showing a vast amount of rage, more than usual that is. He turned to the troopers who were now dead silent, as if they were statues. "Did you speak to her?" The Commanders asked, reaching again for the saber at his side. You didn't want to hear that horrible sound again, so you were willing to lie for the sake of those two poor troopers. After all, they never would've spoken to you unless you practically begged for it.

"No, sir," you cried out. "They didn't speak to me."

The Commander looked at you, menacingly. Even the slightest glances from him would send shivers down your spine. He walked closer to you, stopping so his chest was inches from your face. His hand lifting up your chin so you were gazing into his jet black mask.

"You aren't a very good liar."

You felt your body go numb. "Commander, I'm not lying."

He reached his hand across your entire jaw, clenching it hard. "March your prissy little ass back to the cockpit."

You gulped, trying not to choke on your own spit. "Yes, Commander," you said as you sprinted away back to your seat.

The ships engine roared as he soared it away from the village, and back in the direction of the Finalizer. You kept thinking about those troopers, and how they probably hated you now. You nearly got their asses whopped just for asking a basic question. Why could the Commander not handle you asking just a simple question? It was for his own safety, he should be thankful you cared enough to see what happened to him.

"Enough," Commander Ren interjected. "You should've never left the cockpit in the first place."

"Commander, why do you keep reading my thoughts?" You asked ferociously.

He paused, clenching his fist so tightly you were afraid he might shatter it. "I don't want to, but you're yelling," he hissed. "I cant ignore it, though I desperately want to."

You rolled your eyes, completely and utterly annoyed by his antics, "I doubt that's the case, sir," you responded. He had no reason to keep searching your mind for every little thing that crossed it, and considering most of the thoughts your mind had been infected with, you didn't want him to.

Silence reigned for the remainder of the flight back to the Finalizer. The second you landed back on the base, the Commander shot up from his seat. The two troopers in the back carted the rebel pilot off of the ship to god knows where. You went to exit the ship and head back  to the control room, when he stuck out his arm, slamming it into the wall, stopping you from continuing your path out of the ship.

"I expect you to follow my orders more strictly next time."

You looked at him in confusion. "There's gonna be a next time?" You asked mournfully.

He huffed at you in rage, furious with the fact you didn't wish to spend any longer with him. He shouldn't have been that shocked, you thought it was pretty obvious as to why. In a fast and violent motion, he ripped his hand away from the wall, marching off to the ships exit. Then, finally, he was gone. You stood there for a moment in utter disbelief.  He should've been happy you didn't want to spend any more time with him, it's not like he enjoyed so much as a second of it.

You walked down through the hallways, passing by large squads of stormtroopers. They looked so rushed and hectic, probably because they faced a majority of the scrutiny passed on by Commander Ren. At least you had Hux, who was usually kind to you, and a very fair leader. They didn't have any one. Not even their Captain, Phasma, showed them an ounce of compassion.

You brushed those thoughts off as best you could, your primary focus to stop the stagnant bleeding of your nose before you entered the control room. You approached the bridge slowly, still wiping away some excess. Before you even fully entered the room, Hux bolted towards you, a pleasurable grin covering his face.

"You're back!" He exclaimed, rushing over to you. He then coughed, acting like it was a mistake that his voice was a bit too cheerful just to greet his secretary, as it would draw suspicion from the people who surrounded you both. You smiled at him, hoping there wasn't leftover nose blood residue on your face.

"How was it?"

"Oh, the mission. Not terrible at all, sir. Quite boring though."

"No," he huffed, "I meant how was it, with Ren."

You gulped, knowing full well you couldn't tell him of every tension filled moments, and the numerous times the Commander had left you bloody and bruised.

"Oh, it wasn't bad," you chuckled. "But, you know him! So serious!"

Hux gave a rather disingenuous grin. You bit your lip in fear, worried he might be onto you, and that maybe he had some hidden mind reading ability like the Commander did. But, Hux was simply just plain old Hux, and he moved on from that awkward discussion with the flick of his trench coat.  He turned back to the scanners, radars, all machines that scattered the control room. His breath was stagnant, almost forced. You watched as a single droplet of sweat pooled down from his forehead, down to his cheek before he abruptly brushed it away.

"General?" You asked. "Is everything alright?"

Hux looked over at your fellow pilots, who were plugging away into the ships database. "The Commander is, awfully frustrated at this moment. I'm sure you know that," he sighed. You shrugged, not quite understanding the difference between Commander Rens' frustration, or his overall anger issues. Hux finally managed to focus his gaze on you, and shifted his eyes towards your blood stained sleeve, staring at it with a completely mortified expression.

You tried to draw away his attention from that, shoving your hand quickly inside of your pocket. "When is he not?" You said playfully, hopefully halting him from asking any questions.

Hux gave you an awkward smile, he was never the type for jokes. "He's obsessed with finding part of a navigational chart that will lead us to Luke Skywalker," Hux said sternly.

"Like, Luke Skywalker the Jedi?!" You questioned far too excitedly.

Hux hushed you, placing his hand over your mouth in an effort to keep you quiet. "I thought the Commander would've told- never mind," he whispered. Nervously, he glanced around the room, surveying to see if anyone else heard what you had said and thankfully no one did. Placing his hands on your shoulders, he pulled you in close, whispering the last few details into your ear, his breath hot and trembling. "Skywalker is the only threat to the First Orders' rule. The Resistances' last hope ," Hux added, staring deeply into your eyes. "If we don't find and destroy him, it would be our end."

Hux continued to gaze into your eyes, like he was studying every part of your face. The tension kept building as he gazed at you so longingly, so intently. "Forgive me," he remarked, not once shifting his view away from your now blushing cheeks. "I thought I'd never see you again." Your heart thumped against your chest, feeling his hands gently press into your collarbones. His eyes glittered with passion, a look he had never given you before. He genuinely looked almost afraid, as if he meant what he said, the fear of never seeing you again.

"Hux-"

A loud, blaring sound rang through your ear, stopping you both dead in your tracks. Hux flinched, pulling himself away from you, and losing that shimmering glow in his eyes. "What is going on?!" He demanded, rushing over to the pilot overseeing the ships security system.

"Sir, an X-Wing flyer has been spotted heading towards a nearby planet. It could be our pilot."

A sinister smile wiped across Huxs' face, so horrific it sent a chill running down the back of your spine. He clenched his jaw, now turning back to the bridges large window overseeing the planet. "I'll alert the Commander. We'll end this now," Hux asserted, turning back towards you, his expression unchanging, until he saw yours.

"Cadet," he stammered. "What is the issue?" Hux and every other member in the bridge were staring at you with mixed emotions in their eyes. Most of them confused, halted until you gave Hux the answer he was desperately searching for. But you didn't know what the issue was, why you were looking upon your General with such fear in your heart. It was an unconscious look, but there had to be some reasoning behind it, an explanation for why that emotion had presented itself in your eyes.

You shook your head, dismissing the gazes of every pair of eyes that look upon you. Hux sighed, somewhat frustrated you hadn't given an explanation for your behavior. He turned back to the pilot, clenching the inner part of his cheek tightly between his pearly white teeth.

"Stand down until my return," Hux ordered the crew members, the tone of smugness high in his voice. He glanced at you one final time before exiting, his eyes showing instability in every corner of his pupils. You knew he was fearing the worst, that you'd be ripped from his clutches once more, and be placed into those of the Commander.

You stood, gazing off at the other members in the bridge, wondering if they held as much panic in their hearts as you did. Hux had left you there with no instructions, and not us much as a little bit of information. He had been so disorganized, so frazzled in his movements, and you knew why.

Hux didn't want you anywhere near Commander Ren for as long as humanly possible. You weren't sure how well that would work, since Hux just laid down and took it every time he was berated and abused by the Commander. You felt guilty, but it was rather hilarious to watch, and hearing Commander Rens' smooth, piercing voice, lash out at anyone while in your presence, it made your body ache with desire.

You smacked yourself in the face, catching the eye of two stormtroopers who were standing beside the doorway. They stared for a moment, then shrugged your behavior off as they continued their pointless conversation. Nervously, you bit your lip, embarrassed you had drawn that unwanted attention to yourself, and bitterly unhappy that your fantasies had not rid themselves from your mind.

It was a constant battle. Trying to maintain your professionalism, and fawning over the Commanders sensational touch. The brief, tension filled moments the two of you had shared controlled your mind, presenting themselves in the worst possible moments. Fantasies fluttered around every time he entered a room you were in, and you regretfully knew he could hear every bit of it. You wanted it to stop so badly, practically begged for it, but they just wouldn't go away. You hated him, despised him for spinning your life on its head, ruining every bit of certainty you had. Everything was so simple before he came along, and now, it was beyond confusing.

"Hello."

You shook yourself out of your entrancement, glancing to the side to see the young pilot, Simon, staring at you with the cutest pair of puppy-dog-eyes you had ever seen. "Oh," you stammered, not quite sure how to respond. "Hello."

"Do you know where Hux went?" He asked curiously, still maintaining a glisten in his eyes. You paused for a moment, losing yourself in his deep blue orbs, mesmerized by their beauty and majesty.

He waved his hand in front of your nose, inches from its tip in an effort to snap you back into focus. You let out a nervous laugh. "My apologies. As far as I know, he's gone to retrieve the Commander, informing him of the possible Resistance pilot." Simon nodded, placing his hand in a questioning manner around around his chin. His eyes scanned the room, almost as if he was looking for something. You stood nervously as his gazed moved from the divots on the floor to your feet, then sweat began to form on your brow as his eyes shifted up to meet yours, studying every inch of your body on the way up.

"Don't you think we should try and stop that ship from heading where it needs to go?"

"Uhm, what?" You hesitated, finding fear in his now cocky and smug expression. His tongue curled around his lips, sliding over his perfect, white teeth as a crooked smile formed upon his face.

"Well, we don't want that ship to get what it's looking for. So why don't we capture it?" He scoffed, now beginning to circle around your body. Your bones grew stiff, and blown ran cold. It was torturous what he was doing. Your legs ached, screaming at you to run, and you wanted to. Wanted to move, get away, do anything to escape. But Hux told you to stay put. You had to follow your orders.

A stagnant breath escape your mouth, not purposefully. You coughed as to try and muffle it, conceal the fear that obviously didn't want to hide. "We aren't permitted to debate this," you replied, hoping to sound as sophisticated and intelligent as possible. "General Hux gave no orders other than for us to stay put. Therefore, that is what we shall do."

"You follow him too blindly."

A lump formed in the back of your throat, almost sending you into a choke. "I-I'm sorry?" You questioned, no longer was there any sophistication in your tone of voice. He shrugged, "look I get it, you don't wanna go against his rules-"

He stepped closer to you, stopping inches from your face. Shivers rode down your spine as he looked you up and down, a sinister grin wiping over his face.

"But just imagine how proud Commander Kylo Ren would be with you."

Your body went numb, stiffening as he pulled away from your face, wickedly smirking as he turned back to the front of the bridge. "If you won't give the order, I will. But, I think it'd look a lot better if you did it."

You turned away from him, biting your lip so hard, blood to pool from where your teeth had sunk in to the flesh. It was unfathomable, how he was able to sense the sneaking desire in your body that you wanted Commander Ren to be proud of you, impressed by your abilities. So far, all he'd seen you as was a bitchy little secretary. But you wanted him to see more than that, more from you. It was terrible, frankly stupid that you wanted him to find you witty, radiant-

Perfect.

"Simon," you finally responded, dispelling the sense of uncertainty from your voice. "With all due respect, though your idea does seem rather brilliant, I will not go against my orders. That is not my job."

He scoffed, clenching his fist tightly at his side. "Fine," he huffed, marching towards the center of the control room. "Then I'll do it."

All eyes in the room were now on the pair of you, most of them searching your own for an explanation. No one understood what was going on, why the quarrel between you and an ex TIE-flyer was taking place in the middle of the bridge. You knew if Simon began barking out orders, no one would listen to him. But there was that worry, that when Hux returned with Commander Ren at his side, they'd both be disgusted with your lack of initiative.

"Well then," Simon proclaimed to the enter staff. "Why aren't we going after that ship?"

The men stationed at the blasters looked at Simon with disgruntled expressions, not showing any signs of following his orders. The two stormtroopers stationed at the entrance scoffed. Those two knew authority, and how a true leader was supposed to behave and act. Simon did not have what it took to lead, or give any sort or directions.

You stepped forward, positioning yourself next to Simon, which drew the attention back from those who had looked away. Though Simon towered over you in physicality, in spirit, and in status, you could've squashed him with the tip of your fingernails.

“Our instructions come from General Hux and Commander Ren," you stated firmly, digging back into those months of public speaking courses you took at the Academy. "I trust that none of you have forgotten that."

Simon rolled his eyes, opening his mouth to speak once more, when suddenly, he was thrown away from you, and into the nearby wall. The wretched sound of his bones smacking against the hard, metal desks and control panels was enough to make you sick. He flopped onto the floor below, and picked his head up weakly, staring first at you, and then shifting his gaze to the doorway, where even his pain filled eyes widened in pure fear.

Slowly, you shifted your body from the front of the bridge, to the entrance. There, standing with a fully extended arm which twitched with such a violent rage, was Commander Ren. Hux stood beside him, looking rather annoyed he had thrown one of the pilots like a rag doll across the room in front of the entire staff.

"Cadet," Hux stated plainly, not sounding like his usual self at all. His tone was more cross, and a lot more stuck up that in usually presented. "What is the meaning of this?"

You gulped. "Uh, sir. There was a debate about whether or not the rebel ship should be destroyed before landing on-"

Before you could finish your explanation, and tell both Hux and the Commander that none of this was your idea, Hux walked slowly, and horrifically intimidatingly towards you. He stopped inches from your face, and rose his hand up to strike you. You winced in fear, as it had been years since he had slapped you in anger. There wasn't anything to do in that moment, for if you tried to stop him, the punishment would only be worse. You stood there, prepared to have the life knocked out of you by his cold, pale hands, but there was nothing.

Too much time had gone by, and you knew when Hux was ready to throw a physically punishment at you, he didn't hold back. You slightly peeled open you eyes, looking up to see Huxs' hand being held back-

By the Commanders'.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you, General," Commander Ren stated, his gloved hand digging into Huxs' weak and feeble wrist. Hux glared at him, ripping his hand away from the Commanders grasp, rubbing it gently. You knew what Hux was feeling in that moment, that pain. A feeling of remorse tried to rush over you, but it was expelled by gratitude. The Commander, as horrid as he was, had stopped Hux from hurting you. Maybe it was because he himself wanted to, but you didn't get that feeling from him. Not this time.

"You can't possibly think she was in the right to give out those orders," Hux hissed, still massaging his flushed hand.  Commander Ren looked at you, an instant pain rushing through your mind. You clenched your eyes tightly, trying to make it hurt less, but thankfully after less than a few seconds, it was gone.

"She did not give out those orders."

A small grin formed on your face. For once, he had read your thoughts when it was most important, when he actually needed to. Hux shuddered, looking at you with an apologetic glance. You knew he felt bad for not listening, and for behaving so differently towards you. The first guess you had was he believed Commander Ren would find him redeemable if he resented you, but that wasn't the case, not anymore.

"The girl is coming with me," Commander Ren ordered, his words so powerful the room practically shook when he spoke.

You went to swallow down the spit coming from your watering mouth, but after that statement, you choked on it instead. The Commander gave you a slight glance, then returned back to Huxs' gaze as you continued to try and muffle your cough.

"Ren, she is my secretary, and she belongs here on the Finalizer. That's been her job-"

"Her job as of right now is to fill in as my secretary," Commander Ren finished after cutting Hux off mid sentence. You couldn't help but hide the excitement on your face, but Hux couldn't help hide his disgust. "I won't be taking that traitor with me."

You looked over to Simon, following the Commanders' and Huxs' gaze. The boy had pulled himself off of the ground, blood seeping from a large gash on his head. He stares into your eyes menacingly, the once glistening blue orbs now pools of darkened misery. You pulled your attention away from him, afraid he might lash out at you. But Commander Rens' unchanging body language showed you if he so much as tried, the next thrown against the metal wall would ensure his death.

"Ren-" Hux begged, trying his best to keep you here with him. He knew he had messed up, showing violence towards you instead of being rational. Deep down, something gnawed at you, saying the Commanders had been waiting for Hux to slip up like he did today.

Then, you would be his and his alone.

"I've made my decision," Commander Ren stated. "She's coming with me."

A warm feeling flooded over your body, the same feeling you got the day Hux picked you to work in the control room of the Finalizer. It felt wrong, to have that strong emotion again, but this time, you were being taken away from Hux. The Commander ushered you to follow closely beside him, and you did as you were told. Hux turned away from the pair of you, looking back to the members of the bridge. You knew that watching you walk away from him with the man he believes you'd resent must've been beyond hard for him. It was hard for you too.

"You'll be back with him soon," Commander Ren assured as the pair of you approached the doors to the landing bay. You didn't respond, as there was nothing to be said. Hux would be stuck on that ship, without you until the Commander placed you back in his care. You didn't understand why this man couldn't just get another secretary. But you knew if he did, you'd despise whoever it was, hate them even.

The doors to the bay opened with a dramatic hissing noise following their unattachment. Troopers were lined up in formation, receiving orders from their Generals. You gazed out at the bay, thinking of how you'd be stepping off this vessel, your home, to be alone in a cockpit with Commandrr Ren for who knows how long.

You weren't ready, he knew you weren't. He could smell the fear and panic off your body every time he inhaled. Yet, he insisted, made a point to keep you near him. Technically, all you were was a fill in, but it felt like you were so much more than that. But that very well just could have been a dream, a made up reality you had created in your mind.

Commander Ren walked past you, heading down the ramp towards the Command shuttle. You stood back, gazing at the way he marched so powerfully, and so assuredly. Every person on that bay stopped dead in their tracks when he went by, not gawking nearly as much as you were. His cape swayed with every step he took, brushing past his shoulders to reveal the smallest outline of his body.

You gulped as he turned back to face you, ushering for you to follow him. The soldiers stationed on the bay looked up at you now, sending a burning sensation across your back, flooding into every part of your trembling body.

This is going to be rough.

[dornish-queen]

Pedro Pascal on Fame and ‘The Mandalorian’: ‘Can We Cut the S— and Talk About the Child?’

By Adam B. Vary

Photographs by Beau Grealy

When Pedro Pascal was roughly 4 years old, he and his family went to see the 1978 hit movie “Superman,” starring Christopher Reeve. Pascal’s young parents had come to live in San Antonio after fleeing their native Chile during the rise of dictator Augusto Pinochet in the mid-1970s. Taking Pascal and his older sister to the movies — sometimes more than once a week — had become a kind of family ritual, a way to soak up as much American pop culture as possible.

At some point during this particular visit, Pascal needed to go to the bathroom, and his parents let him go by himself. “I didn’t really know how to read yet,” Pascal says with the same Cheshire grin that dazzled “Game of Thrones” fans during his run as the wily (and doomed) Oberyn Martel. “I did not find my way back to ‘Superman.'”

Instead, Pascal wandered into a different theater (he thinks it was showing the 1979 domestic drama “Kramer vs. Kramer,” but, again, he was 4). In his shock and bewilderment at being lost, he curled up into an open seat and fell asleep. When he woke up, the movie was over, the theater was empty, and his parents were standing over him. To his surprise, they seemed rather calm, but another detail sticks out even more.

“I know that they finished their movie,” he says, bending over in laughter. “My sister was trying to get a rise out of me by telling me, ‘This happened and that happened and then Superman did this and then, you know, the earthquake and spinning around the planet.'” In the face of such relentless sibling mockery, Pascal did the only logical thing: “I said, ‘All that happened in my movie too.'”

He had no way of knowing it at the time, of course, but some 40 years later, Pascal would in fact get the chance to star in a movie alongside a DC Comics superhero — not to mention battle Stormtroopers and, er, face off against the most formidable warrior in Westeros. After his breakout on “Game of Thrones,” he became an instant get-me-that-guy sensation, mostly as headstrong, taciturn men of action — from chasing drug traffickers in Colombia for three seasons on Netflix’s “Narcos” to squaring off against Denzel Washington in “The Equalizer 2.”

This year, though, Pascal finds himself poised for the kind of marquee career he’s spent a lifetime dreaming about. On Oct. 30, he’ll return for Season 2 as the title star of “The Mandalorian,” Lucasfilm’s light-speed hit “Star Wars” series for Disney Plus that earned 15 Emmy nominations, including best drama, in its first season. And then on Dec. 25 — COVID-19 depending — he’ll play the slippery comic book villain Maxwell Lord opposite Gal Gadot, Chris Pine and Kristen Wiig in “Wonder Woman 1984.”

The roles are at once wildly divergent and the best showcase yet for Pascal’s elastic talents. In “The Mandalorian,” he must hide his face — and, in some episodes, his whole body — in a performance that pushes minimalism and restraint to an almost ascetic ideal. In “Wonder Woman 1984,” by stark contrast, he is delivering the kind of big, broad bad-guy character that populated the 1980s popcorn spectaculars of his youth.

“I continually am so surprised when everybody pegs him as such a serious guy,” says “Wonder Woman 1984” director Patty Jenkins. “I have to say, Pedro is one of the most appealing people I have known. He instantly becomes someone that everybody invites over and you want to have around and you want to talk to.”

Talk with Pascal for just five minutes — even when he’s stuck in his car because he ran out of time running errands before his flight to make it to the set of a Nicolas Cage movie in Budapest — and you get an immediate sense of what Jenkins is talking about. Before our interview really starts, Pascal points out, via Zoom, that my dog is licking his nether regions in the background. “Don’t stop him!” he says with an almost naughty reproach. “Let him live his life!”

Over our three such conversations, it’s also clear that Pascal’s great good humor and charm have been at once ballast for a number of striking hardships, and a bulwark that makes his hard-won success a challenge for him to fully accept.

Before Pascal knew anything about “The Mandalorian,” its showrunner and executive producer Jon Favreau knew he wanted Pascal to star in it.

“He feels very much like a classic movie star in his charm and his delivery,” says Favreau. “And he’s somebody who takes his craft very seriously.” Favreau felt Pascal had the presence and skill essential to deliver a character — named Din Djarin, but mostly called Mando — who spends virtually every second of his time on screen wearing a helmet, part of the sacrosanct creed of the Mandalorian order.

Convincing any actor to hide their face for the run of a series can be as precarious as escaping a Sarlacc pit. To win Pascal over in their initial meeting, Favreau brought him behind the “Mandalorian” curtain, into a conference room papered with storyboards covering the arc of the first season. “When he walked in, it must have felt a little surreal,” Favreau says. “You know, most of your experiences as an actor, people are kicking the tires to see if it’s a good fit. But in this case, everything was locked and loaded.”

Needless to say, it worked. “I hope this doesn’t sound like me fashioning myself like I’m, you know, so smart, but I agreed to do this [show] because the impression I had when I had my first meeting was that this is the next big s—,” Pascal says with a laugh.

Favreau’s determination to cast Pascal, however, put the actor in a tricky situation: Pascal’s own commitments to make “Wonder Woman 1984” in London and to perform in a Broadway run of “King Lear” with Glenda Jackson barreled right into the production schedule for “The Mandalorian.” Some scenes on the show, and in at least one case a full episode, would need to lean on the anonymity of the title character more than anyone had quite planned, with two stunt performers — Brendan Wayne and Lateef Crowder — playing Mando on set and Pascal dubbing in the dialogue months later.

Pascal was already being asked to smother one of his best tools as an actor, extraordinarily uncommon for anyone shouldering the newest iteration of a global live-action franchise. (Imagine Robert Downey Jr. only playing Iron Man while wearing a mask — you can’t!) Now he had to hand over control of Mando’s body to other performers too. Some actors would have walked away. Pascal didn’t.

“If there were more than just a couple of pages of a one-on-one scene, I did feel uneasy about not, in some instances, being able to totally author that,” he says. “But it was so easy in such a sort of practical and unexciting way for it to be up to them. When you’re dealing with a franchise as large as this, you are such a passenger to however they’re going to carve it out. It’s just so specific. It’s ‘Star Wars.'” (For Season 2, Pascal says he was on the set far more, though he still sat out many of Mando’s stunts.)

“The Mandalorian” was indeed the next big s—, helping to catapult the launch of Disney Plus to 26.5 million subscribers in its first six weeks. With the “Star Wars” movies frozen in carbonite until 2023 (at least), I noted offhand that he’s now effectively the face of one of the biggest pop-culture franchises in the world. Pascal could barely suppress rolling his eyes.

“I mean, come on, there isn’t a face!” he says with a laugh that feels maybe a little forced. “If you want to say, ‘You’re the silhouette’ — which is also a team effort — then, yeah.” He pauses. “Can we just cut the s— and talk about the Child?”

Yes, of course, the Child — or, as the rest of the galaxy calls it, Baby Yoda. Pascal first saw the incandescently cute creature during his download of “Mandalorian” storyboards in that initial meeting with Favreau. “Literally, my eyes following left to right, up and down, and, boom, Baby Yoda close to the end of the first episode,” he says. “That was when I was like, ‘Oh, yep, that’s a winner!'”

Baby Yoda is undeniably the breakout star of “The Mandalorian,” inspiring infinite memes and apocryphal basketball game sightings. But the show wouldn’t work if audiences weren’t invested in Mando’s evolving emotional connection to the wee scene stealer, something Favreau says Pascal understood from the jump. “He’s tracking the arc of that relationship,” says the showrunner. “His insight has made us rethink moments over the course of the show.” (As with all things “Star Wars,” questions about specifics are deflected in deference to the all-powerful Galactic Order of Spoilers.)

Even if Pascal couldn’t always be inside Mando’s body, he never left the character’s head, always aware of how this orphaned bounty hunter who caroms from planet to planet would look askance at anything that felt too good (or too adorable) to be true.

“The transience is something that I’m incredibly familiar with, you know?” Pascal says. “Understanding the opportunity for complexity under all of the armor was not hard for me.”

When Pascal was 4 months old, his parents had to leave him and his sister with their aunt, so they could go into hiding to avoid capture during Pinochet’s crackdown against his opposition. After six months, they finally managed to climb the walls of the Venezuelan embassy during a shift change and claim asylum; from there, the family relocated, first to Denmark, then to San Antonio, where Pascal’s father got a job as a physician.

Pascal was too young to remember any of this, and for a healthy stretch of his childhood, his complicated Chilean heritage sat in parallel to his life in the U.S. — separate tracks, equally important, never quite intersecting. By the time Pascal was 8, his family was able to take regular trips back to Chile to visit with his 34 first cousins. But he doesn’t remember really talking about any of his time there all that much with his American friends.

“I remember at one point not even realizing that my parents had accents until a friend was like, ‘Why does your mom talk like that?'” Pascal says. “And I remember thinking, like what?”

Besides, he loved his life in San Antonio. His father took him and his sister to Spurs basketball games during the week if their homework was done. He hoodwinked his mother into letting him see “Poltergeist” at the local multiplex. He watched just about anything on cable; the HBO special of Whoopi Goldberg’s one-woman Broadway show knocked him flat. He remembers seeing Henry Thomas in “E.T.” and Christian Bale in “Empire of the Sun” and wishing ardently, urgently, I want to live those stories too.

Then his father got a job in Orange County, Calif. After Pascal finished the fifth grade, they moved there. It was a shock. “There were two really, really rough years,” he says. “A lot of bullying.”

His mother found him a nascent performing arts high school in the area, and Pascal burrowed even further into his obsessions, devouring any play or movie he could get his hands on. His senior year, a friend of his mother’s gave Pascal her ticket to a long two-part play running in downtown Los Angeles that her bad back couldn’t withstand. He got out of school early to drive there by himself. It was the pre-Broadway run of “Angels in America.”

“And it changed me,” he says with almost religious awe. “It changed me.”

After studying acting at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Pascal booked a succession of solid gigs, like MTV’s “Undressed” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” But the sudden death of his mother — who’d only just been permitted to move back to Chile a few years earlier — took the wind right from Pascal’s sails. He lost his agent, and his career stalled almost completely.

As a tribute to her, he decided to change his professional last name from Balmaceda, his father’s, to Pascal, his mother’s. “And also, because Americans had such a hard time pronouncing Balmaceda,” he says. “It was exhausting.”

Pascal even tried swapping out Pedro for Alexander (an homage to Ingmar Bergman’s “Fanny and Alexander,” one of the formative films of his youth). “I was willing to do absolutely anything to work more,” he says. “And that meant if people felt confused by who they were looking at in the casting room because his first name was Pedro, then I’ll change that. It didn’t work.”

It was a desperately lean time for Pascal. He booked an occasional “Law & Order” episode, but mostly he was pounding the pavement along with his other New York theater friends — like Oscar Isaac, who met Pascal doing an Off Broadway play. They became fast, lifelong friends, bonding over their shared passions and frustrations as actors.

“It’s gotten better, but at that point, it was so easy to be pigeonholed in very specific roles because we’re Latinos,” says Isaac. “It’s like, how many gang member roles am I going to be sent?” As with so many actors, the dream Pascal and Isaac shared to live the stories of their childhoods had been stripped down to its most basic utility. “The dream was to be able to pay rent,” says Isaac. “There wasn’t a strategy. We were just struggling. It was talking about how to do this thing that we both love but seems kind of insurmountable.”

As with so few actors, that dream was finally rekindled through sheer nerve and the luck of who you know, when another lifelong friend, actor Sarah Paulson, agreed to pass along Pascal’s audition for Oberyn Martell to her best friend Amanda Peet, who is married to “Game of Thrones” co-showrunner David Benioff.

“First of all, it was an iPhone selfie audition, which was unusual,” Benioff remembers over email. “And this wasn’t one of the new-fangled iPhones with the fancy cameras. It looked like s—; it was shot vertical; the whole thing was very amateurish. Except for the performance, which was intense and believable and just right.”

Before Pascal knew it, he found himself in Belfast, sitting inside the Great Hall of the Red Keep as one of the judges at Tyrion Lannister’s trial for the murder of King Joffrey. “I was between Charles Dance and Lena Headey, with a view of the entire f—ing set,” Pascal says, his eyes wide and astonished still at the memory. “I couldn’t believe I didn’t have an uncomfortable costume on. You know, I got to sit — and with this view.” He sighs. “It strangely aligned itself with the kind of thinking I was developing as a child that, at that point, I was convinced was not happening.”

And then it all started to happen.

In early 2018, while Pascal was in Hawaii preparing to make the Netflix thriller “Triple Frontier” — opposite his old friend Isaac — he got a call from the film’s producer Charles Roven, who told him Patty Jenkins wanted to meet with him in London to discuss a role in another film Roven was producing, “Wonder Woman 1984.”

“It was a f—ing offer,” Pascal says in an incredulous whisper. “I wasn’t really grasping that Patty wanted to talk to me about a part that I was going to play, not a part that I needed to get. I wasn’t able to totally accept that.”

Pascal had actually shot a TV pilot with Jenkins that wasn’t picked up, made right before his life-changing run on “Game of Thrones” aired. “I got to work with Patty for three days or something and then thought I’d never see her again,” he says. “I didn’t even know she remembered me from that.”

She did. “I worked with him, so I knew him,” she says. “I didn’t need him to prove anything for me. I just loved the idea of him, and I thought he would be kind of unexpected, because he doesn’t scream ‘villain.'”

In Jenkins’ vision, Max Lord — a longstanding DC Comics rogue who shares a particularly tangled history with Wonder Woman — is a slick, self-styled tycoon with a knack for manipulation and an undercurrent of genuine pathos. It was the kind of larger-than-life character Pascal had never been asked to tackle before, so he did something equally unorthodox: He transformed his script into a kind of pop-art scrapbook, filled with blown-up photocopies of Max Lord from the comic books that Pascal then manipulated through his lens on the character.

Even the few pages Pascal flashes to me over Zoom are quite revealing. One, featuring Max sporting a power suit and a smarmy grin, has several burned-out holes, including through the character’s eye. Another page features Max surrounded by text bubbles into which Pascal has written, over and over and over again in itty-bitty lettering, “You are a f—ing piece of s—.”

“I felt like I had wake myself up again in a big way,” he says. “This was just a practical way of, like, instead of going home tired and putting Netflix on, [I would] actually deal with this physical thing, doodle and think about it and run it.”

Jenkins is so bullish on Pascal’s performance that she thinks it could explode his career in the same way her 2003 film “Monster” forever changed how the industry saw Charlize Theron. “I would never cast him as just the stoic, quiet guy,” Jenkins says. “I almost think he’s unrecognizable from ‘Narcos’ to ‘Wonder Woman.’ Wouldn’t even know that was the same guy. But I think that may change.”

When people can see “Wonder Woman 1984” remains caught in the chaos the pandemic has wreaked on the industry; both Pascal and Jenkins are hopeful the Dec. 25 release date will stick, but neither is terribly sure it will. Perhaps it’s because of that uncertainty, perhaps it’s because he’s spent his life on the outside of a dream he’s now suddenly living, but Pascal does not share Jenkins’ optimism that his experience making “Wonder Woman 1984” will open doors to more opportunities like it.

“It will never happen again,” Pascal says, once more in that incredulous whisper. “It felt so special.”

After all he’s done in a few short years, why wouldn’t Pascal think more roles like this are on his horizon?

“I don’t know!” he finally says with a playful — and pointed — howl. “I’m protecting myself psychologically! It’s just all too good to be true! How dare I!”

[snarwor]

moon and old stars - chapter 8

sorry

(cw for dark themes, to include thoughts of death, trauma, and references to suicide)

Masterlist

-------------------------------------------------

It all happened so fast.

At first.

One minute, everything was going the way it should, the TIEs had taken the bait, Boba had fled to hyperspace, the boarding team was on Gideon’s ship. When Boba had come out of the micro-jump, he attached the Slave I to the flattest side of an asteroid and waited.

And waited.

Thirty minutes had passed in a terrible blur Boba remembered feeling before, in the Pit of Carkoon. In the hot, bloody sand on Geonosis. He realized with a nasty jolt just how fatalistic his line of thinking had become. The deal will be fulfilled. Din will get his kid, Kryze will get her Moff, and I… I’ll get nothing. “A Mandalorian lives deal to deal. Never make a deal you don’t know for certain you can’t live past finishing,” Jango had told him, just a bit of knowledge Boba hadn’t understood then, and knew all too well now.

Almost angrily, Boba tightened bolts around the tracking system monitor, adding a bit of percussive maintenance almost as an afterthought. The sharp clang of his vambrace against the machinery snapped him from his thoughts. Who was he to go around, banging his father’s ship to hell and back? Even now, he still tensed whenever he made a loud-enough sound on the ship. Not to mention the odd guilt of tinkering and tampering with practically everything on it. Back in the passenger bay, the immobilizing cots were re-initialized. Gideon would hopefully be coming back alive, if Kryze kept her promise and wasn’t so hot-headed as Fett knew she was.

Those damned comments about his father were...well, they weren’t pleasant. Usually Boba was better about those kinds of comments, but in his defense, not even Fennec Shand made those kinds of comments. 

Din hadn’t spoken to him afterwards, too focused on the mission to notice Boba’s ire, or if he had noticed it, it just hadn’t mattered, not with the kid so close. Boba sighed at the reminder, a deep exhale that he never wanted to stop, blow all his air and anxious energy out at once like he was jettisoning it from himself. A sharp beep on the comm had him almost gasping for air in surprise. He felt a bit ridiculous as a result. He opened the comm line.

“Mission’s over. Requesting pickup.” Fennec’s voice...shook. This wasn’t good. He moved silently through the crawlspace, packing up his gear.

“Affirmative. Any casualties?”

“Kryze got hit in the chest but she’s upright, Reeves says she’s had worse. Dune and I, we’re fine. Gideon’s knocked out but alive.” She paused, her voice catching on something again.

She was leaving out two very important details. Boba’s blood turned to ice even as he engaged the hyperdrive, returning to the light cruiser’s coordinates.

“Fennec. Just say it.” Don’t say it, don’t say it...

“Kriff, hold on.” Boba’s fingers tightened around the jump lever, pulling it back when indicated by the monitor. The cruiser came up like a damn wall in front of him, and he easily steered the ship to the docking zone, where several dozen stormtroopers lay scattered across the flight deck. Fennec’s voice was softer when she spoke again. “Mando didn’t get the kid.”

That’s...not what he expected.

“Then why are we still here?” Boba snapped, his relief coming out as impatience.

“I can’t explain it.”

“Try.”

Dark troopers. A sword made of darkness. A sword made of green light. A Jedi. An x-wing.

“Boba...he took off his helmet. For the kid, he took it off, and he hasn’t put it back on, and I don’t know him like you do, but he looks like he might—”

Boba was already in motion, his feet barely touching the ground as he flew through the cargo hold and onto the flight deck. His indicator led him toward the bridge, but he caught up with the group as they were walking back. Reeves fired off a shot he barely managed to dodge before he shouted angrily, “You treat all your rides like that?”

After a beat, he stepped out from behind his cover, one hand on his blaster just in case. He scanned his eyes over the group: Shand. Dune. Gideon on Dune’s shoulder. Reeves. Kryze, glaring at…

Din.

The others may not have seen that look on his face before, but it’s one Boba was well-acquainted with. The boy was lost, holding his helmet like… like... 

Like he didn’t deserve to wear it, and like he didn’t know where to go. Boba brushed off the phantom heat of Geonosis and moved closer. “You not taking the ship, Kryze?” he said, banishing the memories.

She had her helmet off, tucked into her arm. Her fiery eyes met Boba’s expressionless visor. “No. Too much heat here. They shot off a distress signal before we could breach the bridge.”

“Better luck next time, princess.” Reeves made to take a swing at him, but Boba barely reacted. “Take one of the TIEs they still have docked in the hangar. You’re not coming back on my ship.” Especially not with Din like this...

“Why would I want to, anyway, you clone piece of—”

“Hey, Gideon’s not exactly a featherweight, alright? Am I permitted upon your ship, O Gracious Boba Fett?” Cara snarked at him, already walking right by, the disgraced Moff dangling like a ragdoll off her shoulder.

“There’s a cell waiting for him on board.” She and Fennec walked right by, and Kryze turned to Din, who barely reacted.

“This conversation is not over.”

“Just take the fucking saber, Kryze,” Din said, his voice tired and raspy in a way that meant he was on the verge of passing out on his feet. Fennec’s earlier warnings still rung through his mind like crashing church bells. He looks like he might— Boba’s eyes couldn’t leave him, picking up every twinge in his step, the way he favored one arm, the scorch marks on his vambraces. The spear remained at his back, but at the man’s words, Boba looked to his hip. Dear kriffing lord.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Boba said before he could stop himself. The three looked at one another, bewildered. “Tell me that’s not the kriffing Darksaber.”

“It’s the Darksaber, so I’ve been told,” Din sighed, letting his helmet dangle from his fingertips while he pushed his other hand through his hair. It still held the same curls and easy wave as when Boba had cut it for him, but they’d been crushed by the helmet and sweat. “She won’t take it.”

Bo-Katan made a squawking, indignant noise at his blasé tone. “You won it in combat! I can’t—”

“You are being purposefully difficult for selfish reasons,” Din hissed, pain marring his features as equally as anger. “You shouldn’t need a fucking lasersword just to rule a planet. Go take Mandalore, go take your fucking ghosts, take your fucking sword, I don’t want it.”

“I have to best you in combat for it, it is the only way!”

“You would kill him? Kill a father, just for a hunk of metal and crystal?” Boba said, aghast. “You would kill him for a planet cursed with terrible rulers? Thought you had more honor than that.” He moved to Din’s side, still protecting, still protective.

“I don’t need to kill him to—”

“Just fucking do it,” Din rasped.

“What?” Boba snapped.

“Just kill me. Just fucking take it. I’ve fulfilled my obligations to you, to both of you. Kid’s s-safe. Ship’s yours. Gideon’s captured. So kill me.” Din took a step forward, and Boba hardly heard the footfall over the blood rushing in his ears. “Kill me and live with the memory. Then tell the stars you won. No one will know but you, Mand’alor.” The passageway was dead silent in response to his resigned testimony.

Boba’s heart dropped to his feet. He couldn’t mean…? He couldn’t possibly be serious. He felt dizzy, like the first time he ever hit anything with a blaster, and watched it fall to the ground, unmoving. He felt equal parts numb and not, the echoes of not his father’s voice shouted through modulators, a terrible echo of what he had, and what he had lost. He felt the slam of a hull against his body, the impact of hot sand and the greedy pull of gravity, a clean swallow into the earth. He heard that horrible echo, kill me, kill me, kill me...

Bo-Katan looked just as horrified. “No,” she says, shaking her head for emphasis. “You’re injured. You...you wouldn’t fight like a warrior, as decreed by—”

Boba spoke, instinct at the helm where rational thought had abandoned ship. “Tradition is the only thing keeping you from taking the damned thing.”

“Stay out of this, clone,” she snapped back. A deep sigh from Boba’s left interrupted any reply he would have snarled in return.

“You know what? Fuck it, I’ll keep it. Come kill me, come fight me when you deem me ready, I don’t care. Work through your problems first, then you can be one of mine.” Din walked off without another word, leaving Boba to be the only one to bear witness to Bo-Katan’s fury.

Facts and figures raced through Boba’s mind and came to a stop at understanding: Din was behaving irrationally, and shouldn’t be left alone.

As he walked back the way he came, Boba couldn’t help himself. “You heard the Mand’alor.”

He was sure Bo-Katan was still shrieking when he boarded the Slave I. Gideon was all laid out in one of the mirrored transparisteel cells on the passenger deck, still unconscious. Even in this state, the man looked too cunning for his own good. He’d wake up in a mirrored box with nowhere to flee and nobody to sneer at but his own reflection. Boba always appreciated that about the prisoner cells.

He came to a standstill when he saw the shiny beskar helmet laying, discarded, on the deck. It stuck his heart in his throat did a moment. He shook away the sand from his peripheral vision and stopped to pick it up.

Cara was already strapped into the passenger seat, watching everything with a detached worry that Boba didn’t like. There was nothing about this situation that he liked. “He went up to your bunk,” she said, not looking up at him. He wondered if she had looked down when Din had walked through. If she had looked away on the bridge, if she had kept her eyes ahead when walking through the cruiser.

He didn’t know if he actually wanted to know.

“Great.”

“Fennec’s gonna take us to a New Republic base.”

“Perfect.”

“I’ve got first watch on Gideon. He tried offing himself on the bridge.”

“Of course he did.”

“The others not coming?”

“Absolutely not.” He hit a button on his vambrace and reveled in the satisfaction that he didn’t need to manually operate much on the Slave I anymore. The ship, the armor, Boba, they were one. Jango’s pride and joy. The cargo hatch closed with a hiss and the thrusters engaged instantaneously, Fennec pulling them into space and as far away from this mess as possible.

Boba hesitated at the intersection past the passenger bay. To the left, down into the berthing area and Din. To the right, up into the cockpit and control.

He turned left, and descended.

The narrow passageway had a persistent flickering light overhead which cast an eerie glow about the space. In the ghost stories older bounty hunters used to tell him as a child just to scare him, they used to mention flickering lights as signs of impending doom.

The sun hadn’t flickered that day on Geonosis.

The suns hadn't flickered that day on Tatooine.

Yet the old fear remained.

The ship gave a familiar lurch into hyperspace and Boba swallowed the fear, ignoring his pounding heart in favor of whatever lay beyond that door. Boba removed his helmet before opening the door to his berthing.

Two helmets in hand, he entered, finding Din had gotten into the few bottles of spicewine they’d brought with them from the Core world safe house. His eyes were hard but unfocused, his cheeks ruddy but dry. He looked ill, Boba thought. The noise of the two helmets touching the shelf was too loud, but neither man commented.

Din was still in full beskar, though it looked worse for wear in places, like his hands had been shaking too hard for him to remove anything successfully. So now he sat, wrapped in beskar yet armorless, on the deck of Boba’s ship.

Boba joined him there, knowing it was as healthy as keeping company with a trilling thermal detonator. The longer he thought of what to possibly say, the longer the silence screamed between them. Din brought the wine back to his lips and drank deeply, uncaring toward the messy blood-red splashes that dribbled past his mouth and onto his chest plate.

Something had changed in Din, a complete shift of his entire person that Boba hadn’t been there to witness. He knew the word for what it was, but it never seemed to encompass the variety of emotions that warred with one’s senses. The despair. The turmoil. The burning anger. The choking guilt. The merciless reminder that someone isn’t there anymore.

There were no words that could have filled Boba’s emptiness or put out the wildfire rage scorching his heart, back then. There was no amount of revenge that would have brought Jango back. There was no number of beds he could fall into and believe they were the embrace of another. There was cold, and there was flame, the icy white burning of an old star that had been dying for decades.

Yet, something had changed in himself as well, and he had been around for it but had not been aware of it. In the...fuck, it had been just less than a month, since the refinery mission on Morak—in that time alone, Boba had felt Din move into his orbit, but...no. That wasn’t right either. Boba had moved into Din’s orbit. They’d eclipsed one another countless times since then, covering one another in promises they would chase but never fulfill, looks that would never become meaningful glances, touches that would never, ever last. Perigee, apogee, perigee, apogee again. They had phases, and their shine was reaching darkness again, waning crescent.

He had not seen Din at full darkness, that first day back when he was only a distraction. It was ironic that the moment Boba could not be around to cast a guiding light on Din, he found himself a weapon made of darkness and could not rid himself of it. He was stuck here with his grief, empty fulfillment and burdensome guilt atop his shoulders, yet Boba orbited him just out of reach. Everything felt just out of reach.

“My father told me once that the first direction most species look for answers is up,” Boba blurted out. The words didn’t stop. “He told me that for all the atrocities borne on any world, they always blamed the stars. Thanked the stars. Asked the stars why. Trillions of trillions of questions throughout time, sent across the galaxy until they realized they could find the answers themselves by looking down at one another. The stars never had any answe–“

“Shut up.”

Boba’s skin prickled a little at the interruption, and he stuttered to a halt, looking over at Din. “What?”

“I said shut up. I don’t want to hear whatever fucking bullshit your father said, I don’t want to hear about the stars or a moon made of crystals or a damned thing you have to say!” Din’s voice had crescendoed into a shout, hoarse and toneless. Formless anger. Misfired plasma beams. “Why didn’t you let her just kill me when she had the chance?!” His eyes spat the same fury his mouth had, and his knuckles were moon-white around the bottle in his hands.

“Din—”

“No. Tell me why.”

Masks were a strange thing in the galaxy. In some cultures they were seen as coy, charming and flirtatious. They covered one’s identity only to be cast aside in a fit of passion. In other cultures they were used to tell stories and fables to children before they learned that evil wore many faces. For many Mandalorians, their mask was a part of their full armor. To hide one's face was to have honor, to be a part of an enduring galactic symbol of warrior ethos and heritage. It was necessary for foundlings to feel accepted, they knew not the face of their fathers because everyone was their father.

Boba Fett knew the face of his father. The entire galaxy knew the face of his father. He wore several masks, hiding parts of himself, of the collective, so deeply inside himself just to feel some sense of individuality among the millions who shared his face. Even after he had recrafted Jango’s helm, there were still cracks in that mask, irreparable from the brash actions of his vengeance. The helmet he had held to his forehead in a mirshmure’cya, countless times after that day, it had reflected that first mask back at him, showing the burning anger in his eyes. It had frightened him into doing something he regretted. When that anger had exploded, it had also taken one of the few pieces of his father he had left. He would reforge a new helmet, but the mask he wore constantly was now another gift from Jango: the gift (curse) of his face.

He saw his father’s anger and judgment and disappointment staring back at him, everywhere. He avoided mirrors whenever possible for that reason. For years, Boba only smiled at death, hedonism, sharp shooting. He had forgotten the easy laughter of his youth, the carefree smiles at his father’s fancy flying in their Firespray-class ship. He hid those joyful parts of himself and let the prophecy fulfill: he became Jango as he was remembered.

A ruthless. Deadly. Fanatical. Bounty hunter.

Nowhere in there was the term Mandalorian. He could not wear a heritage, he could not gain honor through hiding his face, he could not ascend to the heavens nor pursue a normal life in the galaxy.

(Among other reasons, one of the biggest was that clones were not legally classified as people, after all.)

There was still that crack in the mask, though, that little fissure that wouldn’t melt into submission, that tiny fracture that spidered out under pressure. And when Din had come to him that day and blurted out “I need a distraction,” his clever hands had pried the careful edges of that fault line apart, and wriggled themselves deeper, reaching for the next mask to tear apart on Boba.

It was a ripping noise Boba always heard, when Din would cry or when Din would kneel or when Din would blush and smile and pull smiles and praise helplessly from Boba’s lips. The infiltration of the other masks had been surgically precise, and completely unintentional.

So why, why wouldn’t Boba let Bo-Katan kill him for the stupid lasersword of Mandalore?

“Because I love you, Din.”

Read on AO3.

[masterjedilenawrites]

The Helmeted Hunter: Chapter 28

Boba Fett x Reader

Chapter Warnings: N/A

AO3 Link (In case you like it better over there, it’s okay, no judgement)

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Chapter 28: The Last Plan

"One more," he'd whispered in your ear, late on your last night with him. You'd been curled up at his side, as you always did before drifting off to sleep, though he'd never be there when you woke. You'd groaned but kept your eyes shut.

"Last one, I promise," he whispered. "A final back-up, if everything else fails and we're desperate. It'd be risky, and messy, but it'd be a last resort. Our last hope."

You'd only hummed in response as Boba had explained his idea, on the verge of a sleep you'd never thought would come in all your nervousness. But you remembered it clearly now, repeating his words in your mind a few times as you were led down a never-ending corridor by Commander Krennic.

There were other options, plans you'd worked hard on, accounting for all the variables you could think of. Plans to get messages to Boba, plans for him to pick you up, plans to hide safely for a time.... You'd covered so many variables, even a few crazy ones that did not seem likely. But none of them fit a scenario where you'd find your mother.

Except for the last plan.

There was a song that, if you could somehow manage to get ahold of your music player and play it for Boba in the Slave I, would signal him to send out a message. It'd be unencrypted, easy to stumble upon, sent to someone like Hondo who would also not be able to keep his mouth shut. He'd pretend to have found the other buyer and that the price had risen even more than 5 million. And he'd give the coordinates of your location with the Empire, pinging back to him from the tracker in your arm.

Any decent bounty hunter, pirate, or entrepreneur would be monitoring intergalactic chatter... and they would all immediately come after you. They wouldn't be able to resist such a payload, Boba had insisted, even if it meant crossing the Empire. Krennic and his soldiers would be overwhelmed by the onslaught and unable to pick a single person to blame in the aftermath. He could come for you without secrecy, amongst all the other hunters. It'd be chaotic, but he was certain he could take you before anyone else could.

The only problem would be stopping them all from continuing to hunt you. But that's why it was a last-ditch-effort, Boba had said just as you finally succumbed to sleep; it would be a risk reserved only for the most desperate of situations.

Krennic turned a corner, you and your mother following just behind. This may not have been what Boba had in mind as a desperate situation, but you were definitely on the verge of panic. Your mom being here changed everything. What would happen when Krennic realized you knew nothing of your father's whereabouts? You had to make sure she got out safely, too.

The Commander led you into a large room with monitors and a mess of equipment in the corners. Science-y looking people milled about, halting their work as soon as Krennic entered with you in tow. You looked a few in the eyes, trying to tell if they were truly loyal to the Empire, or prisoners like your mom.

"What a day, friends," he said as he swept across the room dramatically. The stormtroopers that had been flanking him stopped in the middle of the room, and you and your mom followed suit. "Your colleagues on the other side of the ravine made some wonderful progress today with their lasers, and now you all will soon be able to resume your work with the teleportation device."

He spun to face you and your mom, clasping his hands in front of him with a smirk. "That is, if you all cooperate."

There was murmuring, and your mom shifted nervously beside you, but you were much too occupied with trying to find a way to kick off your own plans. Thankfully, you didn't have to search long. Krennic pulled your music player from his pocket, shaking it in the air a few times to draw attention to it.

"Our analysts here have ways to dissect this device," he said in just a slightly lower voice, indicating his words were more for the two of you now. "But I thought I'd give you a chance to save us all the trouble. This was left by your husband for the bounty hunter you'd hired. It's a way to find him, isn't it?"

Your mom squinted and Krennic took a few steps closer. "What is that? Your old music player?" She looked at you, truly perplexed. You gave her a small nod, needing her to fill up a bit more of Krennic's time while you came up with an idea.

"I... I don't know why he'd have that. I mean, I knew he grabbed some old things in the attic before leaving, but I thought he was being sentimental. I didn't think something like that would matter to him... Maybe it was just a way to let her know her dad looking for her? Like a little clue?"

As predicted, your mom had rambled just long enough, and now you knew how you could spin this in your favor. You cleared your throat, trying to act sheepish and not like you were up to something.

"Actually, I think you're right, sir." You could feel numerous pairs of eyes staring at you. "Now that I know what's really been going on, it makes sense. The thing isn't broken, it just plays the music somewhere else. Where he is. It wasn't a clue for me to find him; it was his way of trying to find me."

You took a hesitant step forward, reaching out for the device. Krennic considered you for a moment before handing it over. It took all your self-control not to let your hands shake from this small victory.

"Once you hit play, it should activate a signal, like a homing beacon." You scrolled around the list of songs, making a show of picking one at random, while really settling on the one that would initiate your plan.

Krennic was now squinting his eyes, and you feared he might be getting suspicious. You gulped and tried to make yourself seem smaller. You were just a little nobody who didn't ask to be caught up in any of this and was now trying to stay on the good side of your captors. It wasn't far from the truth.

"Or at least, I think that's what he'd do with it."

"Yes," you were surprised to hear your mom say. Her voice was small, too, and you knew she was playing along. "I... remember there were similar ideas for secret communication with the scientists he worked with. Yes... that would make sense...."

Whatever doubts Krennic may have had seemed to disappear. He straightened up and snatched the device back from you.

"Good, good. I knew you had some usefulness yet, girl." He inspected the little screen that showed your chosen song playing. You wished you could know for sure Boba had heard it.

"So since it is on and playing, your husband will be learning that his daughter ended up with us here now, on Eadu?"

Your mom nodded, and you bobbed your head along, too.

"Well, signals can be traced both ways. Even if he's not brave enough to finally come out of hiding and surrender with the rest of his family, we can find him."

He tossed the device to the nearest person in a white coat, giving them a nod as their order to start examining it. You knew Boba would have turned off the transmitter by now, especially upon hearing that song, but you were still nervous. What if there was a tiny detail that gave you away?

"Take them out," Krennic waved a dismissive hand at the stormtroopers. But then held up a finger. "Actually, put the girl in one of the lower level rooms."

Your mom started to protest as the stormtroopers grabbed each of your arms and began to pull you in opposite directions.

"Orson, please. I haven't seen her in months...."

"Your family has caused enough headaches to last me a lifetime. I won't have you conspiring and making even more trouble. You'll stay isolated in your rooms until we finally get our hands on your husband and the codes. Then we'll discuss how to best bring you all to justice."

Krennic was already walking away by the time he finished, his lisp coming through on the last word. You tried to give your mom a reassuring look to calm her worries, but it was too subtle. She disappeared the way you'd came while you were moved through a different door, looking as old and distraught as you'd ever seen her.

That wouldn't be the last time you'd see her, you told yourself. The plan you'd just put in motion was crazy, but it was for her. And your dad. And every other loved one who might still be out there. Everything they had done for you, to save you, you resolved to pay back.